Chapter 3 A Real Smile

The cab dropped me off in front of the old building I'd been calling home for two months, ever since some quiet part of me had already sensed things with Marcus were unraveling faster than either of us admitted out loud. I thanked the driver and stepped out into what was left of the storm, the rain thinning now to something closer to mist.

I climbed the steps two at a time, fumbled my key into the lock with fingers gone stiff from the cold, and pushed the door shut behind me the second I was inside.

I stood in the entryway a moment, dripping onto the tile, and let myself just breathe. My hand found my stomach before I'd even decided to move it there, and something in my chest, still tight from the last three hours, loosened just slightly.

I smiled.

It was real, and it was mine, and it belonged to no one else in that house I'd just left. The thought that followed close behind it wasn't as gentle. My child would grow up never knowing who his father was. I stood there with that settling over me, and I didn't have an answer for it yet. I only knew I'd made my decision back in that dining room, and I wasn't going to unmake it now.

I ran a hot bath and let sleep take me faster than it had in weeks.

I woke to thin lines of morning sunlight across the ceiling, and to a knock at my door.

Grandma stood in the hallway with two paper bags, her silver hair pinned the way it always was, her coat still damp at the shoulders from the walk over.

"You didn't have to do this," I said, taking one of the bags.

"I know I didn't have to." She stepped past me into the kitchen like she owned it, which in every way that mattered, she kind of did.

We fell into an old rhythm, her cracking eggs, me making toast, the same rhythm we'd had since summers when I was small enough to sit on the counter and watch. Twenty minutes later we sat across from each other, breakfast steaming between us, sunlight warming the little kitchen until the storm from the night before felt almost like something I'd imagined.

It was somewhere between the eggs and the second cup of tea that she slid a card across the table.

I looked down at it, then back up at her. "Grandma, no."

"Sienna."

"I don't want it."

This was the part that always undid me with her. Not the offer itself, but what it meant to take it. If I took the card, I was admitting something I hadn't let myself say out loud yet, that I couldn't do this entirely on my own, that five years of telling everyone I was fine had maybe been a smaller lie than the one I was about to tell myself now if I refused help I actually needed. Pride told me to push it back across the table. Everything else in me, the part that had thrown up on a bathroom floor an hour ago and would do it again tomorrow, knew better.

"I know you don't want it." She pushed it another inch closer, her expression settling into the stubbornness I'd clearly inherited whether I liked it or not. "That's exactly why I'm giving it to you. You're pregnant. You need security. If something happens, I want to know you're not standing there with empty hands."

"I can take care of myself."

"I never said you couldn't." Her voice softened, just slightly. "But there's a difference between being capable and being alone, and I won't watch you carry both of those at once if I can help it."

I sat with it a moment longer than I needed to, turning the choice over the way I'd turned over the choice in that dining room the night before. In the end I reached out and took the card, but I set my own terms the moment my fingers closed around it.

"I'll pay you back," I said. "Every cent. And I'm going to start working, soon, so I don't need to use this for long. I don't want to lean on anyone longer than I have to."

She reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. "You won't owe me anything. But if agreeing to that is what lets you sleep tonight, then fine. Take the time you need. Just don't be too proud to let the people who love you help while you find it."

It wasn't surrender, taking that card. It felt more like drawing a second line, right next to the one I'd drawn with Marcus, one that said I would accept help on my terms and no one else's.

-

Across the city, Marcus sat down at his desk and found himself staring at nothing in particular.

His assistant's voice came through the intercom once, then again, then a third time, each attempt a little more hesitant than the last.

"Mr. Steele? The Whitfield contract needs your signature before eleven."

He heard her. The words registered somewhere in the back of his mind, filed away with a dozen other tasks waiting on him. But his hand didn't move toward the folder in front of him, and his eyes didn't leave the rain still tracking slow lines down the window beside his desk.

Somewhere in the last hour, a thought had lodged itself in him that he couldn't shake loose. He could ask someone to check on her. Lucas, maybe, or one of the drivers who still knew her address by heart. It would be easy. A phone call. A quiet word. No one would ever have to know he'd asked.

His hand actually moved toward his own phone before he stopped it, flat against the desk, deliberate.

No. That wasn't his right anymore. Whatever he still felt when he thought about her walking out into that storm, whatever had kept him from sleeping properly the last three nights, he had signed away any claim to worry about her the moment he'd told her to sign those papers. Checking on her now would mean something he wasn't ready to admit, and worse, it would mean pretending he still had a place in her life that he'd made very clear, in that dining room, he didn't want.

"Mr. Steele?"

He blinked, and the office swam back into focus.

"Yes," he said finally. "Send it in."

She did, though he could hear the confusion in the pause before she did.

In five years of running that company with the kind of sharp, immovable focus that had made his family's name mean something in rooms full of powerful people, he had never once been like this. Distracted. Caught between a decision he'd already made and a curiosity he refused to act on.

He looked back out the window, toward the storm finally clearing over the city, and made himself a promise instead of a phone call. He would let her go, completely, the way he'd told her he wanted to. He just hadn't expected keeping that promise to feel this much like losing an argument with himself.