After a long pause, he nodded.
“No guards unless you request them.”
“I choose my doctor, my apartment, and my lawyer.”
“Yes.”
“You do not use the baby to force me back into this marriage.”
His gaze fell to the unsigned papers.
“I will not.”
“And you do not call her an heir as if she is an asset on your balance sheet.”
A faint, painful smile touched his mouth.
“She is our daughter.”
“Our daughter,” I corrected, “does not belong to either of us.”
He nodded again.
The elevator ride down was the first time Adrian and I had stood beside each other in eight months.
He kept his hands at his sides.
When the car shifted, he moved half a step closer, ready to catch me, but he did not touch me.
In the lobby, cameras waited behind the glass doors.
News of Henderson’s removal had already leaked.
Adrian’s security chief approached, but Adrian raised one hand.
“She decides.”
I chose the private garage.
He drove me to my apartment himself.
No convoy.
No armored car.
Just a dark sedan and silence broken by directions I gave one street at a time.
When we reached the narrow building in Queens, he stared at the flickering entrance light and the broken lock on the outer door.
“I can have this fixed tonight.”
“You can ask the landlord.”
He looked at me, then nodded.
“May I walk you upstairs?”
It was the first time Adrian Whitmore had ever asked permission to do something he wanted.
“Yes.”
Inside my small apartment, his wealth became almost absurd.
The kitchen table had one uneven leg.
Baby clothes dried on a rack near the radiator.
A secondhand crib waited beneath the window.
Adrian stopped in front of it.
He ran one finger along the chipped white rail.
“You built this?”
“The instructions were terrible.”
“I missed everything.”
“You did.”
He looked at the stack of ultrasound photographs on the table but did not pick them up.
“May I?”
I handed him the most recent one.
The image was grainy and unclear to anyone who did not already love the person inside it.
Adrian held it like a document capable of sentencing him.
“That is her face?”
“Side profile.”
“She has your nose.”
“She has no room left in there.
That is what she has.”
A laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
It broke almost immediately into something rougher.
He turned away, but not before I saw tears in his eyes.
I had watched Adrian threaten executives, confront armed men, and stand unmoving through his father’s funeral.
I had never seen him cry.
