Chapter 7 - The Unspoken Timeline
“Take off your coat, Ethan,” Hannah said, her tone devoid of emotion as she pointed to the antique oak coat rack beside the door. “You’re dripping on the floor.”
Ethan obeyed without a word. His hands were shaking so violently that he fumbled with the dark horn buttons of his overcoat, nearly tearing one from its thread before managing to slide the heavy wool from his shoulders. He hung it up, revealing the tailored fit of his dark charcoal suit, the white shirt pressed with razor precision, the black tie immaculate. Yet despite his corporate armor, he looked entirely hollowed out—a ghost in expensive tailoring.
He set the red gift box and the bouquet of roses onto the mahogany console table beside an arrangement of silver candlesticks.
“Hannah…” Ethan began, his voice cracking into a ragged, desperate whisper. He took a step toward her, his large hands hovering in the air between them as if he wanted to grasp at the space separating their bodies. “How old is he?”
Hannah looked at him, her hazel eyes unblinking, cool and clear as mountain water.
“He was six in July,” she answered flatly.
Ethan’s breath hitched. His fingers curled into fists, his knuckles turning translucent white. “July. July twelfth?”
“July fourteenth,” Hannah corrected. “At Sacred Heart Medical Center, four miles from this house. He weighed seven pounds, four ounces. He had a full head of dark hair and your exact eyes.”
A hot tear broke from Ethan’s lower lid, tracing a burning path through the dark stubble on his cheek. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, a dry, strangled sob tearing from his chest that he could not swallow.
“You knew,” Ethan choked out, dropping his hands to stare at her with an agonizing mixture of grief and bewilderment. “When we sat in Marcus’s office in Chicago… when we signed the dissolution papers in December… you were already two months pregnant.”
“Seven weeks,” Hannah said, her voice dropping into a register of terrifying, crystalline clarity. “I found out four days before our final court date. I had the confirmation test in my purse while your lawyer was explaining how generous you were being by letting me keep the furniture from the guest bedroom.”
Ethan flinched as though she had struck him across the mouth with a lead pipe.
“Why didn't you tell me?” Ethan cried out, his voice rising in raw, ragged anguish that he fought to contain beneath the cheerful instrumental carols floating through the house. “Hannah, in God’s name, why didn't you say something? I would have stopped everything! I would have torn up the papers! I would have walked away from the firm!”
Hannah tilted her head, looking at him not with anger, but with a profound, sorrowful pity that made Ethan’s knees feel like water.
“Would you have, Ethan?” she asked quietly.
The question hung in the warm, cedar-scented air like a guillotine blade.
“You would have stayed because of a baby,” Hannah continued, her voice steady and unyielding. “You would have stayed out of duty, out of guilt, and out of a desperate need to manage your public image. And every time you missed a late-night conference call, every time you lost a partner track promotion because you had to come home for a doctor's appointment, you would have looked at that baby and resented him. And you would have resented me.”
“That’s not true!” Ethan pleaded, tears cascading down his face, heedless of the dignity he had spent a lifetime cultivating. “I loved you!”
“You loved your career, Ethan,” Hannah replied, her American accent soft, precise, and devastatingly honest. “You loved being the youngest senior director at Harrison-Vance. You loved the sixty-hour weeks, the corporate dinners, the international flights, and the applause of men who wouldn't cross the street to spit on you if you were on fire. You told me—on this very night, seven years ago, in our apartment on Lincoln Park—that my desire for a quiet life was a disease of the mediocre.”
Ethan squeezed his eyes shut as the memory hit him with the force of an avalanche.
The penthouse in Lincoln Park. The snow outside. The unopened bottles of wine. The screaming match over an eight-o’clock flight to London on Christmas morning. He had stood over the granite island, wearing a thousand-dollar suit, and had told her that while she was content with scrapbooks and garden plots, he was building an empire that mattered.
May you like
He had forgotten those words.
She had carried them across two thousand miles of frozen interstate, etched into the marrow of her bones.
