Chapter 9: How Long

The parking lot behind the medical building was half empty and smelled like hot asphalt.

Posey went ahead to get the car, which was her way of giving us three minutes.

She also gave Lachlan a look as she went, and the look said that she had a pharmacy's worth of ways to hurt him.

I stood by a concrete planter holding the ultrasound printout against my chest.

Lachlan stood in front of me with his hands half raised, as if he did not know what he was permitted to do with them.

"I have one question," he said.

"Okay," I said.

"How long have you known?"

"I told you. Since the morning of the gala."

"The morning," he said slowly. "So when you stepped onto the dais, you knew."

"Yes," I said.

"You knew you were carrying my child when you took the microphone."

"I did."

He said nothing.

I watched his eyes go somewhere I could not follow.

His face had the blank stillness I had seen in board meetings.

It was the look of a man laying out pieces on a table and counting how each would be used.

A full minute passed.

A car door slammed across the lot.

"Say something," I said.

"I'm thinking."

"About what? About me?"

"About how it will look," Lachlan said, almost to himself. "If she knew, if the timing."

He stopped.

He had heard it too.

But it was too late, because I had already heard the rest of the sentence he did not say.

"If I planned it," I said.

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't need to. You were working out how your mother would put it. The nurse who knew she was pregnant and took a microphone anyway," I said.

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