Chapter 2

I spent the rest of the night deciding how much truth my parents could bear at once.

They were older now. My father's heart medication sat in a neat row beside the kitchen sink. My mother had started holding the railing whenever she took the stairs. I couldn't walk into their bedroom at three in the morning and tell them the man I had defended for a decade had been waiting for motherhood to make me easier to remove.

So I lay awake in my childhood room and went back to the beginning.

Ethan and I had met in college. My father disliked him immediately, though he tried to be polite.

"He's smart," Dad had said after our first dinner. "But smart and steady aren't the same thing. If you build a life with him, you may spend years paying for his ambition."

At twenty-two, that sounded romantic.

Ethan and I rented a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen table too small for three laptops. Our friend Adrian Blake slept on a folding cot whenever a product launch ran late. We ate noodles from paper cups and wrote code until sunrise.

When Ethan wanted to put every dollar we had saved for a wedding and a house into an artificial-intelligence platform, I didn't hesitate. I sold the small condo my parents had transferred to me and put the proceeds into the company.

Everyone else called it reckless.

I called it faith.

For a while, that faith paid off. The company grew from three people in an apartment to three floors in a glass office building. At our first major technology conference, the host introduced Ethan and me as the college sweethearts who had built a hundred-million-dollar company from nothing.

I believed that was the story of our life.

As the company grew, Ethan and I stopped making decisions the same way. I wanted stable releases and careful hiring. He wanted speed. I wanted to delay a funding round until our data-security work was finished. He said I didn't understand what investors expected.

My office moved from beside his to the far end of the executive floor.

Then, two years ago, I got pregnant.

I kept traveling through the first trimester because we were negotiating our largest enterprise contract. I miscarried after a brutal week of flights and meetings. No doctor told me the travel had caused it, but I blamed myself anyway.

Ethan's parents urged me to step away from work and focus on trying again. Ethan held both my hands and cried.

"Trust me," he said. "I'll protect everything we built until you're ready to come back."

I had trusted him.

At eight the next morning, I showered, borrowed a blouse from my mother, and drove to the company.

The security guard at the garage recognized my car but not my face. The receptionist upstairs did a better job hiding her confusion.

Only a few longtime employees greeted me by name.

My old office no longer existed.

The wall had been taken down to create two smaller meeting rooms. My desk, shelves, framed patents, and the pothos I had kept alive since our apartment days were gone. Three dusty boxes remained in a supply closet. One contained old conference badges. Another held product notebooks in my handwriting.

I was kneeling beside the third when I heard footsteps behind me.

"Claire?"

Ethan stood in the doorway, perfectly dressed except for the faint bruise-colored shadows under his eyes.

"What are you doing here?"

I rose slowly. "I work here."

"Of course you do. That's not what I meant." He glanced toward the hallway, where two employees had slowed to watch us. His voice softened. "Where were you last night? I came home and you were gone."

"I stayed with my parents."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"You were busy."

For one second, panic moved across his face. Then he smiled.

"Work has been rough. I know I've neglected you. But this isn't the time for you to jump back in. We agreed you would focus on your health."

We had never agreed. He had asked. His mother had cried. My mother had said rest might be good for me. Eventually, the pressure had become a decision everyone remembered as mine.

"I heard the funding round hit trouble," I said. "My leave is over. I'm here to help."

His gaze shifted toward the empty rooms. "Your office is being renovated."

"Then I'll share yours."

"Claire—"

"We started at the same kitchen table. I'm sure we can survive one office."

Before he could answer, I waved over two facilities employees and asked them to move an unused desk into Ethan's suite.

The door shut behind us twenty minutes later.

My new desk sat directly across from his.

Ethan stared at it as if I had placed an explosive between us.