The Man from That Night

Two mornings later, Alessandro drove me to my appointment.

He had asked whether I wanted Liam instead. I had said no, then spent twenty minutes examining why.

At the clinic, he held my coat while I filled out the forms. When I reached the emergency contact section, my pen hovered.

"You can put Liam," he said.

"I know."

I wrote Alessandro's number, which I now knew by heart, and turned the clipboard over before he could watch me reconsider it.

The doctor was a calm woman named Dr. Patel. She spoke to me first, asked what I wanted, and made it easy to say that I wanted to continue the pregnancy even though I was frightened.

Alessandro sat beside me. His hand rested on his knee, close enough for me to reach.

When the image appeared on the screen, I forgot about the papers, the house, the old recording. There was something impossibly small inside me, and it was real.

I caught his hand.

He closed his fingers around mine. Not hard. Just enough.

The doctor explained the dating and the next appointments. I listened, but part of me stayed with the grainy image and Alessandro's thumb resting motionless against my knuckles.

In the car afterward, he looked at the little printout for so long I had to clear my throat.

"I believe you're supposed to start the engine."

"Yes."

He didn't move.

"Alessandro."

He looked over. His eyes were bright.

"It's very small," he said.

I laughed, and then I cried, and then I did both at once.

He unfastened his seat belt and leaned toward me.

"Can I hold you?"

I nodded.

His arm came around my shoulders. I pressed my face against his neck, where he smelled of clean wool and the soap I had begun recognizing on the bathroom towels.

"I'm terrified," I whispered.

"So am I."

I drew back enough to look at him. "You hide it better."

"I've had more practice looking unpleasant."

That earned him another laugh.

On the way home, I asked him to stop at a bakery. He returned with a paper bag large enough to supply a small conference.

"I said a cheese Danish."

"You also said you weren't sure what you could eat."

"That was three days ago."

"I'm responding to the available information."

We ate at the kitchen table, the ultrasound image between us beside a scattering of pastry flakes.

For the first time since he had come to my door, we talked about something without danger sitting in every pause.

He told me he had wanted to study architecture before his father decided he could learn buildings by owning them. He still kept sketchbooks. He looked almost embarrassed when I asked to see them.

I told him my mother had taught music and that I used to sing while cooking, until Liam had threatened to charge admission to the neighbors.

"You sang in the hotel," he said.

I stared at him. "No, I didn't."

"In the elevator. Quietly. You said the music was making you nervous, so you supplied your own."

Heat rose in my face. "You weren't supposed to remember that."

"I've been remembering a great deal."

The words settled between us, warm and unmistakable.

I looked down at my hands.

"I was going to leave before we reached your floor."

"I know. You asked whether the elevator stopped in the lobby on the way down."

"You noticed?"

"Emma, you were holding the emergency button like it was an escape route."

The memory came back clearly.

I had been standing in a borrowed black dress beneath my catering jacket, my shift finished, my courage in pieces. He had offered a quiet room where I could wash champagne from my wrist. At the elevator, I had told him I didn't do this.

"Get into elevators?" he had asked.

"Go upstairs with men I don't know."

He had held the doors open. "Then we can have coffee downstairs."

I had looked at the hand keeping the doors from closing. A small scar crossed his thumb. He had been giving me an exit without making me feel foolish for wanting one.

I had kissed him instead.

Now, across his kitchen table, I remembered the way he had gone still for half a second before kissing me back. His surprise had been the first thing about him that belonged to me alone.

"You didn't ask me about Sloane," I said.

"I saw you watching him. I thought he'd frightened you."

"And you didn't want to know why?"

"I wanted to know everything. You looked like you needed one evening when nobody asked."

I swallowed.

That was why I had gone upstairs. Not his suit or his name. I had been tired of carrying a dead woman's life, and for a few hours he had let me feel alive without demanding an explanation.

"When did you learn who I was?" he asked.

"Your last name was on a call that came through your phone. You said it when you answered."

"And you stayed."

"I wanted something I shouldn't have wanted."

His gaze darkened. "You can stop making it past tense."

My breath caught.

He waited.

I stood, walked around the table, and laid my hand against his jaw.

"I still don't know how to trust this."

He turned his face into my palm. "Then don't pretend you do."

I kissed him.

This time there was no borrowed name between us, no hotel door, no assumption that I could leave before morning and make the wanting disappear.

He pulled me into his lap, carefully at first, until I gripped his shirt and made a sound against his mouth. His hands tightened at my waist.

"Tell me if you want me to stop," he said.

"I want you to stop being so far away."

He stood with me in his arms. I laughed in surprise, then caught the back of his neck when he looked at me.

We made it upstairs slowly, kissing between steps.

Later, beneath his sheets, I traced the scar at his thumb while he watched my face.

"I didn't stay because of the baby," I told him.

He brushed my hair from my cheek.

"I know."

For the first time, I believed that he did.