Zara’s pov
A man who couldn’t speak had just given me the clearest instruction anyone had given me in months.
“You know,” I whispered, once the shock of it settled enough for me to form words again.
“About the baby. You’ve known.”
Richard held my gaze, steady despite the exhaustion visibly dragging at every part of him.
Yes.
“How? I haven’t told anyone. Not even Noah knows the father’s name.”
He couldn’t answer that with any efficiency, not tonight, not with what little strength remained in him, but something in his expression told me it didn’t matter how he knew.
Sharp minds trapped in still bodies noticed things the rest of us missed while running around too fast to look closely the way I’d stopped drinking wine at dinner without explanation, the way I flinched at certain smells, the way my hand drifted to my stomach sometimes without my permission before I caught myself and pulled it back.
“How long have you known?” I asked, genuinely curious now despite everything else pressing on the moment.
He couldn’t spell out a precise answer to that, not efficiently, but his eyes drifted briefly toward the window, toward the garden beyond it, and something in the gesture made me think of an earlier week, before the gala even, when I’d first started noticing him watching me a little too closely during our evening visits.
“Weeks, then. You’ve known for weeks and said nothing.”
A single blink.
Yes.
And then, unmistakably, something like an apology in the way his eyes held mine a beat longer than usual.
“I’m not upset,” I said, softening.
“I just wish I’d known you knew. I’ve been carrying this alone, thinking I was the only one holding the secret in this entire house.”
He blinked twice, quick, insistent, a rhythm I hadn’t assigned meaning to yet.
“What does that mean?”
It took him a moment to find a way to answer that within the limits of our clumsy alphabet, but eventually his eyes settled into the pattern again, slower this time, like he was choosing the shortest possible route to what he meant.
“N,” I said.
“O,” then, “T,” then, “A,” then, “L,” then, “O,” then, “N,” then, “E.”
“Not alone,” I repeated, my throat tightening.
“I’m not alone.”
Yes, he confirmed, and something about that small, insistent reassurance from a man who could barely move undid something in my chest that I’d been holding tight for weeks.
“Does Ethan know you know?” I asked.
No.
A single firm blink, immediate, certain.
No, again, and then, before I could ask anything further, his eyes started moving with that same urgent purpose from a few minutes earlier, gathering strength from somewhere I didn’t understand, determined to say more even though I could see what it was costing him.
“Richard, you should rest. We can talk more tomorrow.”
He didn’t wait for my permission.
One blink.
Long pause, his eyes fluttering with the effort.
Two blinks.
“T,” I said, reaching for the pad again despite myself, unable to deny him when he was fighting this hard to say something.
“E.”
“L.”
“L.”
“Tell,” I said, my chest tightening.
“Tell who, Richard? Tell what?”
He kept going, slower now, each letter arriving after a pause that stretched longer than the one before it, but his focus never wavered, never drifted the way it sometimes did when true exhaustion finally won out over will.
“E.”
“T.”
“H.”
“A.”
“N.”
“Tell Ethan,” I finished for him, the words landing in the quiet room like a verdict.
“You want me to tell Ethan about the baby.”
Yes.
Immediate, certain, no hesitation in the blink at all, like he’d been waiting weeks for someone to finally catch up to the thing he’d known for far longer than I’d realized.
“I’ve been trying,” I admitted, my voice cracking.
“I’ve tried three times now. Every time, something interrupts, or I lose my nerve, or I convince myself the timing’s wrong. I don’t know why it’s so hard. I know it needs to happen. I just can’t seem to make myself finish the sentence once I start it.”
Richard’s eyes softened, something almost sympathetic in them despite the frustration I could still sense underneath.
“He’s under so much pressure right now,” I said, the excuses spilling out of me now that I’d started, the same excuses I’d been feeding myself for weeks.
“The board, the leaks, you he’s carrying more than one person should have to carry, and every time I think about adding this on top of it, I lose my nerve. What if he thinks I’ve been using it against him this whole time? What if he thinks I was going to use it as leverage, the way everyone in that gala already assumes I married him for money?”
Richard blinked once, held it.
“You don’t think that’s what he’ll assume?”
No.
Firmer this time, if that was even possible through something as small as an eyelid.
“You’re that confident in him.”
Yes, without a flicker of hesitation, and something in the certainty of it made me wonder how much of Ethan this man understood that even Ethan himself hadn’t fully accepted yet some faith a father held onto even through years of strained silence, the kind that didn’t need daily proof to survive.
“How do you know?”
He couldn’t answer that fully, not with the strength he had left, but he held my gaze with an intensity that felt like an answer anyway the particular certainty of a father who’d watched his son closely enough, even from behind a wall of silence, to know things about him that Ethan himself might not fully recognize yet.
“Okay,” I said, more to myself than to him, some resolve finally settling into place where indecision had been sitting for weeks.
“Okay. You’re right. I need to just do it. Tonight, even, before I talk myself out of it again.”
Richard’s eyes stayed fixed on me, patient, watchful, like he wanted to make sure the resolve actually held before he let himself rest.
“I mean it this time,” I added, half for his benefit and half to cement it for myself.
“No interruptions. No Noah calling. No losing my nerve halfway through a sentence. I’m going to walk downstairs and say it plainly.”
Something in Richard’s expression eased at that, the tension around his eyes softening into something closer to relief, and for a moment I saw past the stroke entirely, saw the man Zara had described from before all of this brilliant, exacting, but capable of real warmth when it mattered enough.
“Thank you,” I said, squeezing his hand gently.
“For pushing me. I think I needed someone to actually say it out loud, even if you had to spell it out one letter at a time to do it.”
His eyes crinkled slightly at the corners, the closest thing to a smile his face could still manage, and something about that small, effortful expression steadied me more than words could have.
“Rest now,” I told him, standing, smoothing the blanket over his legs the way I’d watched Marta do a dozen times.
“You’ve done enough for one night. More than enough.”
I sat with him another few minutes until his breathing evened out into real sleep, his eyes finally closing without the fight he’d put up earlier, and I let myself out quietly, the hallway dim and empty at this hour, most of the household already retired for the night.
My heart was pounding by the time I reached the top of the stairs, adrenaline and resolve tangled together into something that felt almost like courage, or close enough to it that I didn’t want to examine the difference too closely before it evaporated.
I’d rehearsed this moment so many times now that the words had worn smooth in my mind, no longer feeling foreign the way they had that first morning in front of the mirror.
Ethan, I’m pregnant.
Four words.
I was finally, actually going to say them.
I found him still in his study when I came down, light spilling from beneath the door, later than his usual hour but not unusual these days, not with everything he’d been carrying.
I pressed my hand against the door, ready to knock, ready to walk in and finally unburden myself of the secret that had been sitting in my chest for weeks like a stone I couldn’t put down.
I could hear the faint hum of his voice already, muffled through the wood, and I almost knocked anyway, almost let myself interrupt whatever call had kept him up this late, riding the momentum of my own resolve before it could cool.
Then I heard his voice through the door, low, careful, the particular register he used when a conversation mattered more than he wanted to let on.
I walked toward Ethan’s study with the truth finally ready on my tongue, and stopped dead in the doorway when I heard him on the phone, saying my name to someone I didn’t recognize.