Zara’s pov
I told myself I could survive one more site visit on an empty stomach.
I was wrong.
The nausea had started three days earlier, quiet at first, a low hum in the back of my throat I could ignore if I kept moving.
By the morning of the terminal visit it had turned into something else entirely, sharp and insistent, the kind that made toast feel like a personal attack.
“You didn’t eat,” Ethan said, watching me push scrambled eggs around my plate without actually lifting the fork to my mouth.
“I ate.”
“You moved food. That’s different from eating.”
“I’m not hungry this morning.” I stood, taking the plate to the sink before he could study it any longer than he already had.
“What time are we leaving for the terminal?”
“Forty minutes. You don’t have to come, if you’re not feeling well.”
“I’m fine. I want to come.” That part was true, mostly, I liked watching him work sites, liked the version of him that showed up in a hard hat asking sharp questions of foremen who expected him to know nothing.
It was the only place I ever saw him fully certain of himself in a way that had nothing to do with money.
“You look pale.”
“I always look pale. It’s called being indoors nine months a year before I met you.” I forced a smile, and he let it go, though the look he gave me on his way out the door said he was filing it away rather than dropping it.
The drive to the terminal took forty minutes through traffic that did nothing for my stomach, every stop and start another small wave of nausea I swallowed down and refused to acknowledge.
By the time we pulled up to the gates, sunlight glaring off endless stacked containers, I’d convinced myself the worst had passed.
“Mr. Vance.” The site foreman, a broad man named Reyes with a clipboard and a voice built for shouting over machinery, met us at the gate.
“Good timing. We’re mid-inspection on the new crane line if you want a look before the afternoon shift starts.”
“Lead the way.”
“You’re the wife everyone’s been talking about,” Reyes said to me as we started walking, grinning under a sunburned nose.
“Half my crew had money on this marriage lasting two weeks. You’re proving them wrong.”
“Should I be worried about the other half?”
“The other half bet on you outlasting him.” He laughed, delighted with himself.
“Reyes,” Ethan said, dry, “don’t encourage the betting pool.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.” He winked at me anyway, unbothered, and led us on toward the crane line, already launching back into a rundown of load capacities like the joke had never happened.
We walked the yard for twenty minutes, Reyes pointing out load capacities and safety upgrades while Ethan asked the kind of precise, unglamorous questions that told me he’d actually read the reports rather than skimming a summary someone else wrote for him.
I trailed a step behind, nodding along.
That was the smell that did it, I think.
Diesel and hot metal and something briny underneath from the water, all of it hitting at once, and my stomach turned over hard enough that I had to stop walking and press a hand flat against the nearest container to keep my balance.
“You good?” Reyes asked, not unkindly, already moving on to the next point on his clipboard.
“Fine. Just the heat.” My voice came out thinner than I meant it to.
Ethan glanced back.
“Zara?”
“I’m fine,” I said again, and started walking to prove it, which was a mistake, because the ground didn’t feel entirely solid under my feet anymore, tilting somewhere at the edges of my vision in a way that had nothing to do with the terminal’s actual layout.
“You don’t look fine.” He’d stopped walking entirely now, Reyes trailing off mid-sentence somewhere behind him, both of them watching me with the particular attention of people who’d just noticed something was actually wrong.
“I just need a second. Water, maybe.” I pressed my fingers to my temple, willing the world to hold still.
“It’s just hot out here.”
“It’s eighty-one degrees.” Ethan crossed the distance between us faster than I registered him moving.
“You’re not overheating at eighty-one degrees.”
“I’m fine, Ethan.”
“You keep saying that like it’s going to become true if you repeat it enough.”
“Maybe it will.” I meant it as a joke.
It came out breathless instead, and the world tilted again, harder this time.
“Zara.” Ethan’s voice, closer now, sharper, cutting through the fog.
“Zara, look at me.”
I tried.
My knees had other plans.
The last thing I registered clearly was the ground rushing up faster than it should have, and Ethan lunging forward, and the terrible, unmistakable panic on his face, not the careful, managed concern he usually let himself show in public, but something raw and unguarded, the same face I imagined he’d worn the morning his father collapsed. This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
“Somebody call a doctor!” His voice, distant and urgent, the words scattering as my hearing came and went in waves.
“Zara… stay with me, look at me…”
I felt his arms catch me before I fully understood I was falling, his hands gripping my shoulders, easing me down instead of letting me hit the concrete outright, and even through the gray creeping in at the edges of everything, some small, terrified part of my mind was still working, still calculating, still afraid of the wrong thing entirely.
If I faint here, they’ll call an ambulance.
If they call an ambulance, there will be tests.
If there are tests…
“Somebody get water, now,” Ethan said, kneeling over me, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other pressed flat against my cheek like he could hold the color back into my face through sheer will.
“Zara. Stay awake. Stay with me.”
“I’m okay,” I tried to say, though I wasn’t sure the words made it out clearly, my tongue thick and slow, the gray at the edges of my vision spreading faster than I could fight it back.
“You are not okay. You went white as a sheet and dropped like you’d been shot.” His voice cracked slightly on the last word, the kind of crack that had nothing to do with performance, nothing to do with the marriage we were supposed to be pretending at.
“Don’t do that. Don’t you dare do that again.”
“Bossy,” I mumbled, and felt his laugh more than heard it, short and disbelieving, like he couldn’t quite decide whether to be relieved or terrified that I still had it in me to joke.
Reyes was shouting something to someone else about clearing the walkway, about getting a car brought around, the whole yard suddenly in motion around us, and through it all Ethan didn’t move, didn’t look away from my face, his own expression stripped down to something I’d never once seen him let anyone witness, not at the gala, not in the boardroom, not even that first morning three days after our night together when his phone had dragged him out of bed and out of my life for what I’d assumed would be forever.
“Ethan.” I found his hand where it still cradled my head, gripping his fingers weakly.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Not now. Later. Right now I need you to stay conscious and let someone look at you.”
“It’s important.”
“I know. Everything’s important with you.” A ghost of something almost like a laugh, strangled and scared.
“Later, Zara. I promise. Just stay with me right now.”
“Promise,” I mumbled, and even in that state some stubborn part of me needed to hear him say it again, needed something solid to hold onto besides his hand.
“I promise.” His thumb brushed my cheekbone, gentle in a way that didn’t match the panic still radiating off every other part of him.
“Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it together. Just stay awake for me.”
The gray at the edges of my vision won that argument before I could push the words out anyway, my grip on his hand loosening despite everything in me fighting to hold on, and somewhere in that last conscious second, watching his face hover above mine, twisted with a fear too large for a six-week arrangement, I understood with sudden, sinking clarity exactly what was about to happen.
The last thing I saw before the ground rushed up was Ethan’s face, terrified in a way I’d never seen on him before… and I thought, he’s going to find out now, like this, on concrete.