[Bailee’s POV]
I send the email at six a.m. from my bathroom floor, one hand on my phone and the other pressed flat against the tile. Three words—Spencer's office, please—wrapped in enough professional language to disguise the fact that I chose the man least likely to let proximity become personal.
Miles's reply arrives within the hour—warm, supportive, completely fine. "Great choice, you'll learn a ton!" The exclamation mark is doing so much structural work I'm surprised it doesn't collapse.
Blake's response is two words: "Noted. —B." Which, in Blake's emotional vocabulary, is a five-act tragedy compressed into a period.
Spencer sends a calendar invite for eight-thirty with no commentary, because of course he does. The man communicates warmth the way glaciers communicate speed—technically present, functionally invisible.
By seven that evening I'm standing in my mom’s kitchen, and the world has briefly stopped trying to kill me. She is moving—slowly, carefully, but moving—her hands busy with something that smells like defiance baked at three-fifty.
"The trick is the zest." She holds up a lemon like evidence in a trial she's winning. "Most people juice—amateurs. You zest first, then the cake forgives everything."
"Sounds like a life philosophy." I drop into the kitchen chair and my spine releases three weeks of hoarded tension.
"It is a life philosophy." She slides the tin into the oven and wipes her hands on a towel older than me. "Your grandmother said it first."
The kitchen smells like lemon and butter and a woman refusing to let a cardiac condition dictate her Tuesday. I sit at the table and let the ordinariness wash over me—mom’s slippers on linoleum, the hum of the oven.
"Mrs. Patterson's dog is having another existential crisis." She settles into the opposite chair with tea she's not supposed to have. "Third time this week—I think he saw a squirrel."
"Or he's processing his trauma." I lean back and my shoulders drop for the first time since I walked into a conference room and fainted like a Victorian heroine. "Dogs have inner lives, Mom."
"Dogs have food drives and territorial instincts." She sips her tea with the satisfaction of a woman committing a delicious crime. "How's the new position?"
"Overwhelming. I accidentally argued with the CEO about a board presentation and he almost smiled." I tear a napkin edge into careful strips. "I'm told that's the corporate equivalent of a standing ovation."
"Spencer Wallace." She says the name like she's reading it off a file she's been keeping for years. "Your father mentioned him—said he was the only one who pushed back about how you were raised."
My throat works around that, my fingers going still on the shredded napkin. "He never told me that."
"Your father didn't tell you a lot of things." Her voice softens at the edges, something shifting behind the tea steam. "That's not the same as them not being true."
The oven timer ticks in the silence. Mom watches me over the rim of her cup—the same way she watched me at sixteen when I came home from Lake Oswego pretending I hadn't been crying.
"Tell me about the book you're reading." I reach for a redirect so obviously it’s pathetic. "The one with the detective and the dog."
"Bailee." Her cup hits the saucer with a sound that reorganises the kitchen. "Are you pregnant?"
My hand freezes on the table. Every molecule of blood in my body holds position like soldiers receiving a command they weren't briefed for, and the clock on the wall ticks three times, four, five.
"How— " My voice comes out like paper tearing, my fingers curling around the table edge. "What makes you think— "
"You refused coffee when you walked in." Mom holds up one finger. "You pressed your hand to your stomach twice when you thought I wasn't looking." Second finger. "And you went pale at the smell of the lemon cake."
"I made that exact face for three months before you were born." Third finger folds down and her hand finds mine across the table. "The one where you're holding the world together by not looking at the thing that's about to change it."
The sentence lands in my chest with the quiet precision of something that was always going to find its target. My jaw locks, releases, locks again, and my eyes sting in a way that has nothing to do with lemon zest.
"Yes." The word barely displaces air, small enough to vanish before it reaches her. "About five weeks."
Mom’s grip tightens. Stronger than a woman with her condition has any right to be, and the warmth of her palm breaks something I've been holding rigid since a doctor rearranged my universe.
"Whatever is happening, you don't have to carry it alone." Her thumb traces a circle on the back of my hand. "But you do have to stop pretending you aren't carrying it."
"I'm handling it." My voice shakes on the last syllable, betraying everything the first two words tried to build.
"You're surviving it—that's different." She squeezes once, firm and deliberate. "Surviving is what you do when you don't think you deserve help."
I wait for the question—the obvious one, sitting in the room like a fourth chair at this table. Who. Which man, which night, which series of catastrophic decisions led to this particular mathematics.
Mom doesn't ask. She holds my hand across the table in a kitchen that smells like lemon cake and watches my face with eyes that are mine—same amber, same stubbornness, same refusal to blink first.
"When did you know?" My voice is raw, scraped to the grain. "With me—when did you know for sure?"
"When I started crying at soup commercials." Her mouth curves, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening. "A woman serving minestrone to her family, and I sobbed for twenty minutes because the bread looked warm."
Something between a laugh and a sob escapes me—ugly, surprised, real. Mom’s grip tightens and the sound bounces off the kitchen tiles—loud enough that I can’t justify it without acknowledging.
"The cake is going to burn." I say it because my eyes are doing something unforgivable and staring at the oven is easier than this.
"Let it burn." Her hand doesn't leave mine, grip steady as a promise. "Cakes can be remade—this moment can't."
We sit until the timer screams, and she doesn't ask who the father is, and I don't tell her the answer is one of three. The silence between us holds it all without cracking.
My phone buzzes as I'm washing dishes. Spencer—a calendar update, eight-fifteen now, with a note: Hargrove file needs attention. Bring coffee. Not for me. My hand presses flat against my stomach through the dish towel.
Tomorrow I walk into Spencer Wallace's office carrying a secret that could activate a dead man's will and turn my unborn child into a boardroom chess piece. But tonight the kitchen smells like lemon cake and my mom knows, and the weight sits on two sets of shoulders instead of one.
Then my phone buzzes again—unknown number, a single line that turns the kitchen cold: Congratulations on the promotion, half-blood. Enjoy it while it lasts.
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