ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE

I don't tell anyone about his face.

Not Petra, who calls that evening and asks how the meeting went. Not my coworker Diane, who notices at my next shift that I'm quieter than usual and asks if everything is okay with the pregnancy. Not the journal I've kept since I was twenty-two, which currently has four pages of careful, practical notes about the situation and zero pages about the way Dominic Sinclair's expression shifted when I mentioned my mother.

Some things you don't write down because writing them makes them more real than you're ready for.

I go back to work. I take my prenatal vitamins. I eat the things the clinic pamphlet tells me to eat and sleep eight hours and drink enough water and do every single thing within my control because the list of things outside my control has gotten very long very fast and I need the small ones.

What I do not do is Google him again.

I make it four days.

On the fifth day I'm sitting in the break room at St. Raphael's at two in the morning eating a granola bar that tastes like compressed cardboard, and my phone is in my hand, and before I fully decide to do it I've typed his name into the search bar again.

This time I go deeper.

Past the Forbes profile and the charity event photos. Past the business coverage and the acquisition announcements. I find a piece in a financial magazine from two years ago that mentions, in the third paragraph, that Sinclair Holdings restructured significantly following "a personal loss experienced by the company's founder."

Personal loss.

I search his name with different words this time.

It takes a while. He is very good at keeping things out of the press. But eventually I find a small item in a society column from four years ago, the kind of column that covers who attended what event and who was seen with whom. His name. A woman's name beside it. Nadia Voss, described as his companion of two years.

Below that item, dated three months later, is a brief notice.

Nadia Voss, 31, had died in an incident described only as a tragic accident.

I set my phone down on the break room table.

I sit with that for a minute.

He lost someone. Two years with someone, and then gone, and then four years of that Forbes profile with no romantic history and an interview where he said he doesn't have a personal life, he has a schedule.

I think about the elevator yesterday. My shaking hands. The way I told myself his loss was dangerous information because it made him human.

I was right. It is dangerous.

Because now I can't unknow it, and knowing it changes the shape of him in my head, and I really needed him to stay a flat, manageable problem.

I eat the rest of the granola bar and go back to work.

The prenatal appointment is in nine days.

He sends a calendar confirmation forty-seven hours after I email him the details. Exactly one hour inside the forty-eight hour window. I notice this and I tell myself I'm not going to think about what it means that he cut it that close, whether it was his schedule or something else.

I also notice that his confirmation contains a question.

"Is there anything specific you'd like me to know before the appointment? Any questions you want to prepare together?"

I read it three times.

It is such a reasonable, considerate thing to ask that it irritates me slightly, because I had a much easier time when he was just cold and authoritative and easy to push against.

I write back: "Routine appointment. Heartbeat check, measurements, standard bloodwork. Nothing complicated."

He replies in four minutes: "I'll be there."

Two words. I don't know why they settle something in my chest that I didn't realize was unsettled.

Marco comes back on a Tuesday.

I open my apartment door and he's standing in the hallway looking like a man who has been rehearsing something and is no longer sure it was the right thing to rehearse. He's holding flowers, which tells me everything I need to know about how badly he's misjudged this conversation.

"Ella," he says.

"Marco."

"I heard about the pregnancy." He swallows. "Petra told Gio, and Gio told me, and I know you probably didn't want me to know yet but I-"

"Come in," I say, because the hallway is not the place for this.

He comes in. He looks around the apartment we once shared, as if checking what's changed. I've moved the couch. I got rid of the coffee table he picked out. Small things that are also not small things.

He sets the flowers on the counter. I don't put them in water.

"I want to be here for you," he says. "I know I don't have the right to ask for that. I know what I did. But if there's any part of you that wants to figure this out, I'm willing to do whatever-"

"The baby isn't yours," I say.

He stops.

"There was a mix-up at the clinic," I tell him, because he's going to hear it eventually and I'd rather it come from me. "The donor sample was wrong. The biological father is someone else."

Marco's face goes through several things quickly. Confusion. Hurt. Something that looks almost like relief before he catches it and puts it away. I see all of it. I don't say anything about any of it.

"Who?" he asks.

"That's not your concern."

"Ella-"

"Marco." I keep my voice even. "You lost the right to be concerned about my life when you spent two years lying in it. I don't say that to be cruel. I say it because it's true and we both know it."

He looks at the flowers. He looks at me.

"I'm sorry," he says, and I believe him, which is the worst part. He means it completely and it means nothing at all.

"I know," I say. "Goodnight, Marco."

He leaves.

Whew. That was easy.

I stand in my kitchen for a long moment after the door closes. The flowers are yellow. My mother's favorite color. I put them in water after all because they didn't do anything wrong.

Then my phone buzzes on the counter.

Unknown number. Chicago area code.

I answer because I'm an ER nurse and unknown numbers are never something I ignore.

"Ms. Navarro." The voice is not Dominic. It's older, flat, businesslike. "My name is Gerald Holt. I'm the senior legal counsel for Sinclair Holdings. I need to inform you that a situation has developed that may affect the terms of your current agreement."

My hand tightens on the phone.

"What kind of situation?" I ask.

"There's been a leak," he says. "Someone outside the clinic knows about the pregnancy. And Mr. Sinclair needs to see you. Tonight."