Page 43 of Secrets, Scandals and Baby Shoes

On the way home, she stopped at a convenience store and picked up a pregnancy test. Just to be safe, she grabbed a second one. Then she hurried back to her shared apartment, where, luckily, her roommates weren’t home. Now that Lucy was CEO, she’d considered getting a bigger apartment on several occasions, but she mostly enjoyed living with her roommates. Now, though, she would have liked to hurry home to a place where she knew no one would disturb her.

In the bathroom, Lucy locked the door and took out the first pregnancy test. She read the instructions with all the care of a straight-A student reading exam questions, then realized that there was a glaring problem: she didn’t have to pee. Four glasses of water and one glass of orange juice later, she hurried back into the bathroom and took the test.

The instructions told her to wait two minutes, so Lucy set the plastic stick face down on the bathroom counter and started a timer on her phone. Two minutes wasn’t a long time, but the seconds ticked by as slowly as honey dripping off a spoon. Lucy waited for what felt like forever before looking at the timer, only to see that less than ten seconds had passed.

If she was pregnant, it would make everything a hundred times more complicated. Not only would she have to juggle running a company while raising a baby, but she’d also have to figure out how to tell Elliot. He didn’t even want a relationship, so there was no way he wanted a baby. He hadn’t even reached out to Lucy since returning to Chicago. He was clearly ready to close the book on this chapter of his life and leave Lucy and New York behind. A baby probably didn’t fit into that plan.

Lucy bit her lip and wished for time to speed up.

Despite the complications, though, her heart wasn’t racing only with nerves. She felt… excited, too. After all, Lucy had always wanted to be a mother. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d loved kids and looked forward to the day she’d find out she was pregnant. She’d never imagined that day looking like this one, but still. It would be amazing to grow a new life.

Lucy tugged her hair again as she glanced at the timer. Thirty seconds left.

Maybe she wasn’t even pregnant. Monica could have been wrong. Maybe Lucy really was just overtired and stressed, which was causing her to feel sick. Maybe this would all turn out to be nothing.

Or maybe she was going to be a mother.

Finally, after a hundred years, the timer rang. Lucy flipped the pregnancy test over, her hands shaking slightly, and saw the result.

Positive.

She took the second test, too, just to be sure. It came back positive, too.

Lucy was pregnant.

A surge of emotions rushed through her with all the force of a tidal wave. She felt overwhelmed. How was she going to handle single motherhood alongside being a CEO? She felt nervous. How was she going to tell Elliot, and what would he say? But to Lucy’s surprise, the most prominent emotion was happiness. She was going to be a mother, as she’d always wanted. She couldn’t be angry with the tiny life growing inside her, not when it hadn’t done anything wrong.

Her hand rested on her still-flat stomach as she imagined a baby slowly growing inside. Her baby. Lucy found herself smiling, almost giddy. This was going to make everything more complicated, but it was still a good thing. She was going to have a baby.

Elliot probably wouldn’t feel the same way, but that didn’t matter. Lucy had never expected to be a single mother any more than she’d expected to be a CEO, but she could do this. Shewoulddo this. Nothing mattered more than her baby, and Lucy would do whatever it took to make sure her child had the best life.

She met her own gaze in the mirror and nodded slightly. There was a lot to figure out, but she could do this. She still had at least seven and a half months to get ready.

CHAPTER 22

ELLIOT

Afew days after Elliot returned to Chicago, a box had arrived from Borderless. The neat handwriting on top was Lucy’s, and Elliot knew that the box contained the personal items he’d left behind when he’d departed the Borderless offices at top speed. He couldn’t bring himself to open it, though.

As long as the box stayed closed, it was easy to imagine that his life in New York was still waiting for him to return, even as weeks passed since he’d seen Lucy. He wondered how she was doing. He wondered how she’d felt as she’d packed that box for him. He missed her.

Yet Lucy hadn’t reached out in the last few weeks, and neither had Elliot. As much as his heart ached, he felt increasingly convinced that letting her go was the right thing to do. Eventually, she would find someone else. She would be happy. Elliot would console himself with his company. Running Keype was the only thing he was truly good at, anyway. The time they’d spent together had been nothing but a beautiful interlude in alife they were destined to spend apart. It was all as it was meant to be.

Or, at least, that’s what Elliot told himself late at night when the urge to call Lucy grew almost irresistible. If Elliot tried to be part of her life once more, it would only end in heartbreak for both of them all over again. He needed to keep his distance.

One windy Tuesday a few weeks after Elliot had returned to Chicago, Keype announced the hiring of the new maternity-cover CFO. Elliot reached for his favorite pen to sign the contract — and realized he didn’t have it. It shouldn’t have mattered. Elliot wasn’t a superstitious man by nature, but the pen was special. He and Dominic had bought a matching set of pens when they’d started their businesses, and they’d often joked about how those pens were responsible for their successes.

“Is it all right if I sign this a little later?” Elliot asked his assistant.

“Sure.” His assistant put the contract back in its folder. “No rush. We have until next Monday to get it signed. Are you having second thoughts about the candidate?”

“No, he’ll be perfect for the job.” Elliot reached for his keyboard. “That’ll be all for now.” He didn’t want to admit that he was feeling superstitious about the pen. After a quick look around his office, he determined that it must be in the box Lucy had sent from New York. With a heavy heart, Elliot pulled the box out from under the desk, cut through the tape that held it shut, and began unpacking. On top were a few personal photos, a notebook where he’d kept track of some Borderless affairs, and a stapler that wasn’t Elliot’s. That must have been a mistake. When he flipped it over, he saw that it was stamped with Dominic’s name, and his heart lurched. Whether Lucy hadsent it along on purpose or by accident, the stapler now felt meaningful.

A little more digging revealed Elliot’s pen, but there was still a lot more in the box. Elliot picked up a Pura Vida flier, a wine cork from the trip to the vineyard, a rough agenda of the European trip he’d planned with Lucy, and Dominic’s pen, the other half of the set. Each object made his heart constrict further. At the very bottom of the box, he spotted an envelope with his name on it. At first, Elliot thought it might be a message from Lucy, but further inspection showed that the handwriting wasn’t hers.

It was Dominic’s.

Elliot’s heart began to race. In all likelihood, this was an old letter that Elliot had already read, but there was a chance, a slight one, that Elliot was about to hear something from his best friend that he’d never heard before. Sitting in his desk chair, he used a letter opener to carefully slice the envelope open. A single sheet of paper slid out. It was covered, front and back, with the spidery handwriting Elliot had always teased Dominic about.

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