Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Three months of him appearing at the end of her shifts as though summoned. Of him sitting through the new Bond film beside her and critiquing the henchmen's technique under his breath, inaccurate, he'd said darkly, all of it, while she laughed so hard she cried into the popcorn, because of course a stuntman would know. Of him never once letting her pay for anything, and of her retaliating with bruised oranges left on his car, one per rescue anniversary, which he received every time with the gravity of a man accepting a medal.
Three months of knowing almost nothing about him, and everything that mattered.
He didn't talk about his work. Stuntmen were secretive, she'd decided; probably there were contracts. He didn't talk about his family either, or his home, which she'd never seen, and there was a small closed door in him she'd learned to walk past without knocking, the way you learn a limp in someone you love. It hadn't worried her.
Nothing could have worried her today.
Because today, at 9:40 in the morning, in a clinic with beige walls and a fish tank nobody had consulted the fish about, a doctor had looked up from a chart and smiled and changed everything about Aislinn's life.
Pregnant.
She'd walked out of that clinic and sat at a bus stop for forty minutes without boarding anything, both hands pressed over her stomach like she was keeping a secret warm, terrified and electric and eleven feet off the ground. There was a person in there. A person who was half her and half him, half scholarship student and half human wrecking ball, and the world had better brace itself if it got his eyebrows and her luck.
Now she sat in the library not studying, writing and crossing out ways to tell him in the margin of her constitutional law notes.
So, funny story. You know how you do all your own stunts?
I need you to remain very calm. Calmer than the henchman movie.
I love you. There's about to be one more of us.
Her pen hovered over that one for a long time, and the smile finally won, taking over her whole face right there between the stacks, and she pressed her sleeve to her mouth to keep the joy from making noise.
That was when the chair across from her scraped back.
She looked up, still smiling, expecting the glaring graduate student, but instead it was someone else.
"I'm so sorry, Aislinn. I thought you should know about this."
Her friend set an envelope on the table and slid a single photograph out of it, laying it down slow, like a card from a deck that had been arranged in advance.
Valerio. Unmistakably Valerio, sitting on a porch swing with his arm around a woman Aislinn had never seen, a small dark-haired boy laughing between them, every detail rendered clean and real, so that not one part of her mind knew yet to doubt it.
He had a wife.
A son.
The man she loved...was a liar.
The library kept going around her. Somewhere a cart of returned books rolled past. Somewhere the graduate student turned a page. And Aislinn sat at the center of it, pen forgotten in her hand, the ink drying on there's about to be one more of us, while every unknocked door in three months swung open at once and showed her their contents.
Never his home. Never his people. His work, his weekends, his phone forever face-down without a flicker of apology. She'd walked past that closed door so gently, so respectfully, like it was a limp.
It wasn't a limp.
He has a wife. Her thoughts moved like things wading through deep water. He has a wife, and a son.
"No," she said, but it came out without any bones in it.
"I'm sorry," her friend said again, gentler still. "You deserve the truth.“
"I don't know what to do," she whispered.
"Let me help you. You should go away and hide, just in case he tries to find you."
"B-But I don't know how..."
"I know someone...I'll help you, I promise."
Chapter Seven
"I NEVER CHEATED ON you!"
"I know that now," Aislinn said shakily, "but the photo looked so real."
Valerio looked at her in disbelief. "And that's it? You damned me to hell because the photo looked real? Have you never heard of deepfakes?"
"I—well, no—"
Valerio looked as if he wanted to strangle her now. "Well, you should have!"
It was such an absurd thing to shout, and he shouted it so sincerely, this enormous man sitting up in the wreckage of a hotel bed, scandalized across eight years by her insufficient technology literacy, that under any other circumstances Aislinn would have laughed.
But she couldn't.
Because he was right.
She had damned him, and her—she had condemned them to suffer, their own son included, needlessly, and she would bear that sin for the rest of her life.
"I'm so sorry." Her voice wobbled. "I should've asked you about it, but I was just scared you'd convince me to stay, and I was scared I'd say yes, so—"