Page 41 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
She doesn’t look away.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Say that again.”
“I’m pregnant.” Her voice doesn’t waver. “I’m carrying your child. I’m seven weeks gone. You are the only man I have been with. I confirmed it four days ago.”
The room is very quiet.
I stand in the entrance of my own home, and I let those words move through me the way information moves through me when it is significant, slowly and completely, without rushing the processing of it. Seven weeks. Four days ago. The only man.
“Come in,” I say.
She follows me into the main room, and I go to the window because I need something to do with my body while my mind works, and standing at the window is the thing I do. I stand there for a moment with my back to her, and then I turn around.
She’s standing in the middle of the room with her coat still on and her bag still on her shoulder. She’s watching me with the steady composure she brings to every room she walks into, and underneath it, visible to me now in a way it was not visible three months ago, the thing she has been carrying.
“How far along?” I ask.
“Seven weeks.”
“You said that.”
“Seven and a half weeks.”
I look at her. “Why did you say nothing sooner?”
She holds my gaze. “Because I tried to resign so I could disappear before you found out. I had the letter ready the morning you landed.” A pause. “You tore it in half.”
I did.
I think about all of that.
“Sit down,” I say.
She sits.
I stay at the window.
The silence in the room stretches out, and I let it stretch because I need it to. I am a man who makes decisions, and I make them deliberately and without the kind of haste that produces decisions you have to undo later, and what is sitting in front of me right now is not a simple decision. It is several decisions at once, layered on top of each other, each one affecting the shape of the next, and I need to see the full architecture of it before I start building anything.
There is an heir. That changes the council’s calculus entirely.
There is Elena. That changes mine.
There is the Volkov directive and the Grigori situation and the Marchetti problem, and a council session that I have been preparing for with one set of objectives that have just shifted significantly.
I look at her sitting in the chair across the room in her coat at midnight with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on me.
“Come back tomorrow evening,” I say. “Eight o’clock.”
She looks at me. “That’s it?”
“I’ll have a proposal for you.”
She holds my gaze for a moment, searching for something in my face, and I give her nothing because I’m not ready to give her anything yet. Whatever I give her tomorrow, I want to give her properly, with full certainty behind it, and I’m not fully certain yet. I am close. But not yet.
She stands. She picks up her bag from where it has slipped off her shoulder. She walks to the entrance, stops with her hand on the door, and looks back at me once.
I look back at her.
