“What would have been like?”
“Our children. I used to think about it. A little boy with your jaw and your serious face. A little girl with my hair.” She was crying now — not dramatic, not loud, just tears running down her face while she talked through them the way she did, refusing to let them stop her. “I used to picture them in this apartment. Running down the hall. I’d moved the bookshelf in my head, did you know that? To make room for a play area. I’d already rearranged the furniture for children we hadn’t made yet.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“You’re having a baby with a stranger,” she said. “And I’m standing here rearranging furniture for imaginary children.”
“Bea.” I took a step toward her. She held up a hand and I stopped. “That can still happen. All of it. Maybe not here,” I looked around her apartment. “You know Colt and Lilac have a house on club grounds. Three bedrooms, a yard, the whole thing. We could have one like it. You could move the bookshelf wherever you wanted. Whatever you pictured — we can still have it.”
“No.” She shook her head. “You’re having a baby withher, Holden. There will be a child. Your child. Do you know I’ve been waiting for you? Every day for weeks. I’d hear a bike on the street and look up.” Her voice broke properly for the first time. She caught it, pulled it back. “Whatever I was waiting for, it’s not coming. There’s a baby. There’s going to be a child. There’s no version of this where I get you back.”
“You were there,” I said. The horror of it was landing now, properly, fully. “At the clubhouse. You heard me say that.”
“Yes.”
“But you left.”
“Yes.” Sniffling, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. “Obviously.”
“You didn’t hear the rest.”
She looked at me. Her jaw worked. She didn’t want to ask, and she was going to.
“What rest?”
“She said it wasn’t me.”
Bea stared at me.
“Joanne — the woman. After you left. She looked at me and said I wasn’t the man she’d been with. Different height, different hair, different accent. She described him — tattoos I don’t have, a Southern drawl I’ve never had. She remembered him enough to know it wasn’t me.” I made myself slow down. “Glitch pulled all the footage from that night. A weekend rider came in with her — both of them drunk, hanging on each other, laughing too loud. He was staying in the room next to mine. Handful had left my door open and they stumbled into mine by mistake. You can see them come in. You can see them leave. You can see him go to his actual room next door afterward. I was in the chair the whole time. I never moved.”
I watched her face as the words landed. One at a time.
“The baby isn’t mine,” I continued. “I didn’t cheat on you. I never touched her. I was unconscious in a chair while two strangers used my room because Handful left the door unlatched.”
She didn’t speak. Her arms unfolded. Her hands dropped to her sides. She looked at me like she’d been hit with too much at once and her face hadn’t caught up yet.
“You can watch the footage,” I said. “Glitch will show you. It’s all there.”
The silence lasted a long time.
“Okay,” she said.
I waited.
“Okay. You didn’t cheat.”
She wasn’t looking at me the way I’d expected. “Bea—”
“That’s not why we’re not together, Holden.”
The words took a moment to land.
She looked at me then. Really looked — eye to eye, no flinching, the way she did when she was about to tell a client something they weren’t going to want to hear.
“Danny died,” she said. “And you didn’t call me. You didn’t come to me. You drank yourself past the point of consciousness — alone, in a room, in the dark.” She paused. “You shut me out of the worst night of your life. And then you came to my door the next morning and ended things before I could say a single thing.”
I didn’t speak.
