The engine is off. The parking lot hums around me and I haven't moved in twenty minutes.
I know because I've checked the clock four times.
My hands are still on the steering wheel. My knuckles have gone pale from the grip, I've been staring at them instead of the hospital entrance, where the sliding glass doors open and close and open and close for people who know how to make their legs work.
I don't go in. I sit in my car like a man who drove across the city at forty miles over the limit and then ran out of reasons to hurry at the front door.
The tabloids were mine.
The thought has been cycling since Ridley told me. Not the polished version I handed Father — strategic exposure, controlled narrative damage — but the real version.
The one that doesn't survive contact with the image of Waverly doubled over a steering wheel.
I wanted the Duval engagement dead. I wanted Eleanora's name off the table and I didn't care what I knocked over on the way out. So I made sure cameras caught me leaving a club with a woman who happened to be Gary Pryce's wife, and I told myself it was chess.
Collier's math.
The realization had made me sick in the gym at four in the morning. It makes me sicker now.
She is inside this building because I chose strategy over her. And she might be in a room right now losing the fourth pregnancy she's carried.
I release the steering wheel. My hands drop to my thighs. The leather of the seat is warm from the drive over and I focus on that — the warmth, the grain, anything that isn't the thought of Waverly's face if the news is bad.
I wasn't afraid of much at twenty-five. I wasn't afraid of Father when I walked out of his corner office with a check for three percent of his net worth and a plan to make him regret every door he'd ever closed on me.
I wasn't afraid of Gary Pryce or his lawyers or the board that said a thirty-three-year-old building his second competing brand was an overextension.
I am afraid of the sixth floor of this hospital.
The baby is Gary's. I have known this since the night she stood in the parking garage with her suitcase and her wet hair and her terrified hope. I hated it quietly, in the part of myself I don't audit.
The child was Gary's proof that something existed between them, and every time I sat across from Waverly and felt the pull of her — her sharp tongue, the way her hands move when she's building an argument, the fork held like she's forgotten anyone's watching — I had to reckon with that proof sitting between us.
But after the night she spent in my arms, the arithmetic is different.
The child is part of Waverly. It carries whatever she carries — the stubbornness, the composure that cracks only when she thinks no one is looking, the courage that walked into a parking garage with no plan and made a deal at midnight over cold food.
I could be a father to that child. A real one, a caring one.
The thought arrives fully formed and doesn't frighten me. What frightens me is the wanting of it — the fact that it arrived without permission and settled in like it belongs there, like the decision was made somewhere below the level of thought and I am only now catching up.
I turn to a knock on my window.
Sloan is standing at the driver's side, jacket on inside out, one sleeve rolled up and the other hanging loose. Her hair is pulled into something that started as a bun and has given up. She looks like a woman who ran from a bedside to a phone call and back again without stopping.
She gestures with two fingers. Roll the window down.
I do.
"I saw your car when I stepped out." Her voice is flat, stripped of everything unnecessary.
"How is she?"
Sloan looks at me for a moment. Her eyes are sharp even when the rest of her is tired, and what's in them right now isn't warmth exactly — it's the look of someone deciding how much truth the situation requires.
"The baby is fine," she says.
My exhale is louder than I intend it to be.
"Stress-related cramping, not a miscarriage." She pushes her jacket sleeve up, checks her phone. "Doctors want her to rest for a week." She pauses. "She heard the heartbeat for the first time."
I stare at the dashboard. The clock reads twenty-four minutes.
"She's okay," I say. It comes out like I'm testing the sentence for structural integrity.
"She's okay." Sloan pockets her phone and meets my eyes through the open window. "I have a work emergency I've been ignoring for two hours, and I can't ignore it anymore. I don't want her alone up there."
"I'll go."
"I know you will." She says it without hesitation, like she's been watching me make this decision in slow motion from the parking lot and already knew where it landed.
Then she pulls a folded piece of paper from her jacket pocket and holds it out. I take it. A room number written in red pen, Sloan's handwriting is enormous and slightly aggressive.
"Beckett." She doesn't move from the window. Her voice loses the efficiency for one sentence. "She doesn't know you're here."
"I figured."
"That's not a warning." She holds my gaze. "I'm just telling you the situation. She doesn't know, and whatever you walk in there and say — that's on you." She steps back from the car. "Don't make me regret it."
She's gone before I can answer — heels clicking toward the parking structure exit at the pace of someone who has run out of minutes to spare.
I sit for another thirty seconds. The folded paper is in my hand. Six digits and a wing designation written in an angry red pen by a woman who doesn't like me and gave me the room number anyway.
The hospital doors open for me, same as everyone else. The elevator takes forty seconds. The hallway on her floor smells like antiseptic and recycled air, and my footsteps are too loud against the tile as I pass numbered doors.
The number from Sloan's note gets closer. I stop in front of it.
Through the small window in the door, I can see the edge of a hospital bed. A monitor screen. A steady green line moving at a pace that means everything is still running.
My hand goes to the door handle.
I already know I'm not going to say the right things. I know the moment I see her face I will be working with whatever assembles itself under pressure, and that what I want to say and what I am capable of saying at this particular moment are two entirely different documents.
I push the door open anyway.