Page 69 of In This Together

She hadn’t thought about having kids, not seriously. She had never got that burning desire women seemed to get, like Sofia had, like Rosalie had developed. There was no hidden maternal instinct inside her, like Hannah had in abundance.

In any event, she had spent most of her life mothering Sofia. She didn’t need any more practice, nor any more proof that she would be a terrible mother.

For another thing, she didn’t have time in her life for a child. She was career focused.

Moreover, she was… a bitch. A hated woman.

God, if she was pregnant, her spawn was either the result of an illicit affair – most likely – or another fling with a rock star she bedded for a few weeks every year or so.

Taking the tests from her purse, she leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes, because she knew without looking that everything that was going wrong in her life just got trillions of cells worse.

She tried to refocus on the road ahead of her, but her mind was spinning.

When? How? Was it Hunter’s? Was it Tommy’s? When was her last period? Had she missed a period?

How would she tell them? Would she even keep the baby?

What would people say? Hannah. Sofia. Her dad. Rosalie.

Oh, fuck, Rosalie. This could be Rosalie’s brother or sister growing inside of her.

She let out a sob right before throwing up into her lap.

As she looked down to the vomit, she felt… THUD!

‘Fuck!’

Her car swerved right and left until she pulled off to the side of the road and the car she had just driven into the back of pulled up in front of her.

She watched the driver as he leapt from his car and came charging toward her.

‘Pull yourself together, Andi.’

She stepped out of Tommy’s Range Rover to receive a barrage of yelled abuse and finger pointing from the other driver. Ignoring him, she went to the front of Tommy’s car and saw the damage. It wasn’t horrendous, most likely thanks to both cars moving in the same direction, but it was bad enough to cost Tommy an insurance job.

As she ran a hand over the dinted surface, the incessant whining of the man behind her kept going. And suddenly, she flipped.

‘Look, it’s a fucking car. Accidents happen. I’ve had a really fucking shitty day. I’m covered in vomit…’ Then tears sprung from her eyes. ‘And I’m goddamn pregnant. So would youpleasejust take my insurance details and back the hell off?’

‘I… ah… erm… Are you, like, okay?’

‘No, I’m not okay!’ she screamed. She was a raging, pregnant, emotional, terrified, fully-fledged lunatic. And now she was going to have to return this car to Tommy, battered and bruised, whilst she was covered in sick and had pregnancy test kits scattered around the passenger seat.

After swapping insurance details with the other driver, Andrea pulled herself together. The reality was, she was in a situation that would not resolve itself and would not be resolved with tears. She wasn’t entirely sure how best to resolve it right now, but she needed to think it through, strategically, piece-by-piece.

There was one glaringly obvious way to resolve the problem and go back to the life she had just hours ago.

What she needed to do first, though, was return the beat-up Range Rover to its owner and clean herself up.

The thought of driving through the city to Brooklyn and getting back to Tommy even later than she already would, with his expectation of taking her out to dinner, was too much. She made a pit-stop at a shopping centre outside the city and picked up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She hated the look of sympathy the store assistant gave her and the way she offered to discard Andrea’s own clothes out of pity. Yes, she was a wreck – a pregnant woman, covered in her own vomit, with mascara under her eyes from crying over some little bump in a car. This was not her. She was a CEO of a world-renowned recording label.

Outside Tommy’s building, she typed the code for the underground garage into the keypad at the entrance to a downward slope and waited for the roller door to rise.

The code was unique to Tommy’s penthouses – his own and the one that was home to his team – and they would have been alerted to her return.

Parked in the designated spot, between two of Tommy’s other cars, she threw the positive pregnancy tests into her purse, just in time before Mike from Tommy’s security team arrived at the side of the car.

Mike, in his usual black uniform, opened the driver’s side door. He considered Andrea’s outfit and she figured his usual astuteness would have clocked her change of attire, perhaps even the lingering smell of sick in the car. She had attempted a quick wipe around of the upholstery, given most of the vomit had landed on her person, and she had clipped a new air freshener to the dash, but she could still smell the sick.

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