“Idotrust you, but?—”
“Then keep doing that.” His thumb sweeps under my eye. I didn’t realize I was crying. “This changes things, Cass. If I walk in there now, with this in my pocket, and something goes wrong—a janitor, a witness, a security camera I didn’t catch—and I get pinched, what happens to you? What happens tothis?” He taps the paper again. “Hm? Tell me.”
He knows damn well there’s nothing for me to say.
Nodding, he peels the sonogram off my face. He folds it, very carefully, along the existing creases, lining each one up before he presses it flat. Then he opens his suit jacket and tucks it into the inside breast pocket, right over his heart.
“I’ll plan and come back to you with something better. Something that works for…” His hand drifts down between us, the lightest touch, two fingers against the silk over my still-flat belly. “… for all of us.”
His fingers stay there for one beat. Two. Then?—
“Cassandra?”
That’s Raymond’s voice. Sharp. Climbing.
“Cassandra. Where the fuck are you?”
I freeze.
Mat freezes.
And I have the most insane, the most absolutely deranged thought, which is that I want to laugh.
Not because anything is funny. To be clear, not one single thing about this is funny.But my brain has finally caught up to my body, and what my body has been trying to tell me for the last forty-five seconds, what it figured out the moment Mat pressed his palm to my belly and saidall of us, is this:
The plan didn’t just change.
Everythingdid.
19
MAT
Raymond’s voice slithers through the door of the bathroom. Cass goes rigid in front of me. The pink in her throat drains down to the dress’s collar and doesn’t come back.
“Go,” I murmur.
“Mat—”
“Now. Before he comes looking.”
She blinks up at me. Her eyes are glassy, lashes wet, and I want to say something else, something she can carry back out into that ballroom to sustain her. But I can’t think of a single word that’s good enough. So I just press my thumb to the corner of her mouth, very lightly, and tip her chin up.
“Smile for him,” I tell her. “You know how.”
She nods. She does know how. That’s the worst fucking part. She never thought she’d have to do it again.
She steps back from me, pats the silk down her hips with both hands, then she shakes out her hair, presses her lips together, and reaches for the bolt.
The lock thunks. The door cracks. A wedge of amber hallway light cuts in, and she slips out through it without looking back at me.
“Oh, my God,thereyou are!” she crows. “I’m so sorry, darling. I think the fish was off, I had to?—”
“I don’t want to hear about the fucking fish,” he sneers.
“Of course, of course. I’m so sorry. I’m coming.”
Her voice gets fainter as Cass steers Raymond away from the bathroom. Her bright, apologetic patter ripples over the top of his drunken grunts like icing over a rotten cake.
