I turn away from my reflection and look at her. “It’s okay, it’ll be over soon, Mom.”
“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about something else.”
I frown.
“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”
My eyes widen. “I… I… why do you think that?”
“When are you due your period?”
My periods are never regular, but only then do I realize I am late. By more than a week.
“Yes, I thought so.” She looks at me sadly. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
I grip her hand fiercely. “Don’t be sorry, Mom. I want this baby. You don’t know how much.”
She looks into my determined, passionate face and nods. “All right. We’ll manage together. Somehow.”
“It’ll be fine, Mom. I promise. It’ll be fine.”
“Wait here,” she says and leaves the bathroom. She comes back with two pregnancy kits and gives them to me. My mother leaves and I do the test. While I wait for the results I remember again that day when he entered me in that apartment. Not a single word passed between us, and anyone else would have thought it was a quick, rough, ugly encounter, but there was so much need in both of us. It was as if we were starving for each other’s touch.
To think we conceived a child in that strange encounter. I look down at the stick. There are two clear lines on it.
I move to the mirror and for the first time in many weeks I look at myself. I touch my stomach and tears of joy fill my eyes. No matter what happens now I can never again regret everything that happened. Because if not for those things this beautiful miracle wouldn’t have happened.
I tell Lois about my pregnancy.
“Are you going to keep it?” she asks, surprised.
“Of course I am. I want this baby.”
“But you’re not with him anymore. Why do you want his baby?”
“Because I love him. I love him, Lois. More than you could ever know.”
“So what are you going to do?”
I shrug. “I still have fifty thousand in my bank. I might try to buy a small farm somewhere in a faraway land. Somewhere cheap like South America. Grow some vegetables, rear some chickens for their eggs. I fancy the idea of living off the land.”
“Don’t leave New York, please, Raine,” she pleads.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet, Lois. It’s just a pipe dream at the moment.”
She chews her bottom lip. “Aren’t you going to tell him about the baby?”
“Of course I will.”
“What do you think he’ll do?”
“I don’t know. He’s pretty mad with me right now, but I don’t think he can be mad with his own son or daughter.”
“You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think he won’t let you leave New York. I think he’ll want to be part of the baby’s life. I think you’ll have to put your South American dream on ice for a very, very long time. At least until your kid is eighteen years old, anyway.”
Then, finally, I get a reply to the letter I sent to Lana Barrington. It was not difficult to track down such a notable woman with so many charitable causes.
What she says gladdens my heart and fills me with hope for the future. I don’t tell anybody about the letter or its contents. I just burn the letter and go about my business. At least now I know that no matter what happens to me, Maddy is safe. Her procedure can go on even without me.
A small sigh of relief escapes from my mouth. Lana Barrington has just taken care of that problem for me.
Raine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orL-w2QBiN8
The Lonely Shepherd
* * *
The trial begins. The channels and newspapers are full of it. A friend of Putin and a billionaire is savory gossip. Even I get some press. People still remember that I was the girl Konstantin Tsarnov paid a million dollars to have one dinner date with.
I don’t go to the courtroom, but religiously and obsessively watch and read everything I can lay my hands on about it. The prosecution believe Konstantin has a very strong motive. They have testimony from the hacker’s wife that he was working on something big and that he was going to meet a Russian billionaire and negotiate a price with him. Those files are now missing and have been completely erased from his computer so the prosecution have built their case around the idea that something must have gone wrong with the negotiations which caused Konstantin, in the heat of the moment, to murder him and steal the files.
But it seems to me the prosecution doesn’t have anything other than circumstantial evidence.
They have the vodka glass with Konstantin’s fingerprints. They also have his fingerprints on the knife that was used to stab him, but Konstantin’s lawyer says that Konstantin used that knife to slice a lemon to put into the still water they drank together. There are no surveillance tapes of the corridors in the hotel, but they have a video of the entrance of the hotel which shows no one entered the hotel that night that was not accounted for.