Room 1520. A conversation, nothing more.
I should have gone home. To Liam. To our leaking faucet and cheap furniture and my safe little bedroom.
Instead, I stepped into the elevator and pressed fifteen.
He was waiting by the window with Chicago glittering behind him. His tie was gone, his collar open.
For the first time, he didn’t look like a billionaire who could buy anything he wanted.
He looked lonely.
“You came,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have.”
“No,” he replied quietly. “But here you are.”
We talked for hours. I told him about nursing school, about emergency medicine, about losing my parents and missing what it felt like to have someone leave a porch light on for me.
He told me about old crime novels and black coffee and quiet mornings before the world started demanding things from him.
By dawn, talking wasn’t all we had done.
And I left knowing I had crossed a line I could never uncross.
What terrified me most was what he never asked.
He never asked why I was really at that gala.
Thank God he didn’t.
Because the name “Emma” wasn’t just a fake identity to hide from Alessandro.
It was the name of the girl Alessandro’s rival had paid me to spy on.
And now, six weeks later, I was barefoot on Liam’s bathroom floor in my ketchup-stained diner uniform, staring at those two pink lines.
The smell of Liam’s Colombian coffee slipped under the bathroom door.
Then I heard his footsteps coming closer.
“Emma?” Liam called from the hallway. “You okay?”
I stared at the test in my shaking hand, realizing I had only seconds to hide the one secret Alessandro Vitali could never be allowed to find.
But how do you hide a pregnancy when the entire identity you’ve been living is a lie?
👇
The doorknob jiggled.
It didn’t turn all the way. The old lock Liam never fixed caught, and the door rattled in its frame.
“Emma?” His voice was closer now, just on the other side of the wood. “You’ve been in there ten minutes. Your shift starts in twenty.”
My breath came short and too loud. I stared at the white plastic stick and the two impossible pink lines bleeding into certainty.
I shoved it into the empty toilet paper roll on instinct, pushed the cardboard tube to the back of the trash can, under a tissue.
