Page 19 of My Unexpected Surprise
"I know, Pipe."
She pulls her knees up to her chest. "What are you going to do?"
I watch Nico for a moment, nothing concrete coming to mind. "I don't know yet."
"You could—"
"I'm not telling him, Pipe. And I'm not quitting. I need this job."
She tips her head. "I wasn't going to say that, no. I was going to saythink carefully."
I look at her. “And by that you mean?”
She's quiet for a moment. Then: "Can I say something without you getting defensive?"
"Girl, don't say things like that if you don't want me to get defensive.”
"He's his father." She cuts in, tone more serious. "Whatever happened in Venice, whatever you decided afterward, whatever you've built…Nico has a father who's alive and apparently in possession of a shit ton of money."
"That's not the point."
"It's not the only point," she corrects. "But Liv." She turns to look at me. "Just…think about it.”
"I don't know what Valentino Ferretti is," I say quietly. "I spent one night with him. One night, five years ago, with our faces covered."
"And then you built a whole person."
I look at Nico.
He has set two of Piper's keys side by side on the floor and is now comparing their shapes with the grave concentration of a very small engineer.
He picks up the larger one, examines the bow, sets it down. Picks up the smaller. Nods to himself, as though confirming something he already suspected. This makes me chuckle.
I discovered I was pregnant on a Tuesday.
A gas station bathroom, three weeks after Venice.
The pill had failed, or I'd failed it. The doctor I later went to asked if I used any antibiotics recently or had been drinking.
I did both.
Treated sinus infection the week before and messed up my hormones from all the pity-drinking Vito triggered.
I stood in that bathroom for a long time with the test in my hand and did the accounting. The math of one night against a whole future.
I'd tried, afterward, to find him.
It was fucking laughable, trying to find your baby daddy through a voice and a tattoo.
The Chester Street Society is a known quantity in certain circles but an impenetrable one.
I'd pulled at threads for three weeks and kept finding longer, more useless threads. I gave up before I lost my mind.
And then Dante found out I was pregnant.
It was fun.
Within that week, I moved. A new apartment, a borrowed deposit, Piper's couch for three weeks while the lease cleared.
