Chapter 3

I'm still holding my dead card when my phone rings. My best friend, Mara.

"Can you spot me some cash? Or get us a room for the night?"

The pause on the other end tells me everything before she opens her mouth.

"Kyla — it's not that I don't want to. My family's mid-deal with the Chases right now. If I get tangled up in your mess, it could cost us the whole thing."

She doesn't finish the sentence. She doesn't have to.

I hang up and catch my own reflection in the lobby's marble floor. Twenty-something years of my life, and this is what's left of it — a kid on my hip and a stranger's pity behind a front desk.

Rowan sways against me. Then her whole body goes soft, boneless, and I catch her before she hits the floor.

Her forehead is burning.

I scroll through my contacts with one hand, Rowan's weight dead against my shoulder, and land on a name I swore I'd never call again.

The cash comes through twenty minutes later. I carry Rowan back to the desk.

"I need a room. My daughter has a fever."

The clerk looks up, and something in her face shifts — recognition, then something uglier.

"Oh. You're the one who cheated on her husband." Her eyes rake over me. "And had a kid nobody can even confirm is legitimate. Classy."

She waves a hand toward the door.

"This is a respectable hotel. Take it somewhere else."

Every head in the lobby turns. I don't try to argue. There's nothing left to argue with. I carry Rowan back out into the cold with what's left of my spine.

Wind cuts down the street like it's got somewhere to be. Rowan mumbles against my neck, half-conscious, delirious with fever.

"Daddy... don't leave me..."

That one sentence does more damage than everything else combined.

I call Julian. Ten times. Straight to voicemail every time. Finally I type it out instead.

Rowan's running a fever. Can you come.

His reply takes twenty minutes.

She's not mine. I'm not doing this with you.

I read it twice. I don't cry. I don't have anything left to cry with.

I take Rowan to the ER myself.

The waiting room is chaos — coughing kids, tired parents, a TV bolted to the wall playing something nobody's watching. I'm still filling out her intake form when I hear his voice.

Julian, walking Ivy through the doors with one arm locked around her waist.

A nurse hands him a chart, her tone sharp enough to cut.

"Threatened miscarriage, first trimester. This is a critical window. If you're the father, start acting like it — no stress, no arguments, nothing."

Julian takes the chart. Pulls Ivy in closer.

"Still hurting?"

Ivy shakes her head, eyes glassy, and leans into him like she might dissolve if he lets go.

"Don't go home tonight," he says. "Stay with me. I'll take care of you."

Something in me goes very still and very cold.

Years ago, it was me he held like that. Me who couldn't keep water down for weeks. He dropped every meeting, cleared his whole calendar, and stayed by my side for ten straight months.

Kyla, you and this baby are my whole life, he told me once.

Now the daughter he made that promise for is the one he's calling a bastard.

I almost laugh. When someone loves you, there's nothing they won't do. When they stop — there's nothing they won't do either.

Rowan's fever hasn't broken. My phone buzzes in my pocket.

A text from Julian.

Kyla. I'm done waiting. Three days. City Hall.