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The doctor returns with the test results. Annie looks like she’s preparing herself to handle my meltdown. It was too fast, wasn’t it? Is that it? I try to peek at the other side of the clipboard like it would make a difference while the doctor makes a few marks.

“Congratulations, Mrs. Hall,” he says. “You are approximately three weeks pregnant.”

“It’s ‘Miss’ Hall,” I say, because it’s all I can think to say.

“Oh,” the doctor says, and is that the tone of someone judging an unwed mother? I open my mouth to shut him the fuck down but Annie swoops in before I unleash the titan.

“Thank you, Doctor Miller,” she says quickly. “You can bill my office. Lorna has all the information. Come on, Janie, let me get you back to the office.”

Outside, I finally break down, and Annie holds me while I sob into her shoulder. I can feel myself getting sucked straight down into a monumental depression — I know, because I’ve been there before. Not now. I can’t do this now, not again, not ever, not with so much on the lin

e.

Annie takes me back to her office, and we schedule out the appointments. I’ve sent her so much high-profile business that she doesn’t even talk about what it will cost. She doesn’t come cheap. I love her more in that moment than I have ever loved another woman, and strongly consider marrying her. If only I could become a lesbian.

By the time I make it to the car, maybe her bullshit herbal tea is actually doing something, because I’m a little calmer. I can think clearly for a little while.

I will not go back into that hole. No ma’am.

I will do what I did back then. Hurl myself headlong into work. It’s not like I’m in short supply.

It’s also just about the only way I’ll be able to keep myself from finding and murdering Jake Ferry.

Chapter 50

Jake

Not another word from Janie. I’m pressed between two brick walls. On one side, Reginald expects me to be making some kind of progress on that front and I haven’t told him yet that she’s cut me off. On the other, she’s cut me off and there’s a vise clamped around my heart from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep.

More than once I consider going to Red Hall during dinner. I know she’ll be there and there’s a part of me that knows she won’t make a scene; not after Martin, and not after I seemingly foiled a robbery. That would be cheap and manipulative, though, and that’s exactly why she cut me off in the first place.

The only positive to come out of it all is that I’m finally ready to get out from under Reginald’s thumb. If I can get Janie to hear me out, to forgive me for being the worst person on earth, it’ll be worth it. That, and somehow finagle the kind of cash that I can start a business with. Maybe if I do that — if I pursue my own dream — it’ll show her that I’m serious, and that I want to change.

I mull that over for days. Paranoia has me looking over my shoulder every time Reginald is nearby. I can’t shake the feeling that he knows what’s going on, that he knows what I’m thinking. That’s how he made his fortune, after all. Subterfuge is Reginald’s air, water, and food.

He starts keeping me close, for one thing. Oh, he acts like he’s just taking me along, introducing me to all the movers and shakers that I’ll need to know to work more closely with him. A golf game? Really?

I’ve always hated golf, for one thing, and for another Reginald has never taken me anywhere for anything.

Suddenly, though, we’re a father and son team. He praises me in front of his buddies, and I’m expected to make friends with their sons — a lineup of carbon copies. Maybe it’s Reginald’s way of pointing out who he wants me to be. Fall in line, kiddo. All the other billionaire boys are doing it.

And around every corner we turn together, he’s needling me about Janie. I’ve started leaving for a day or two, going up state to the bar on the beach, just to make it look like I’m off securing his plans for Red Hall.

“How’s Janie doing? She let you put it in her ass yet?” He laughs like he made a joke.

I laugh as well, even though it makes me want to vomit, and I shrug helplessly. “Not yet, but soon.”

Another time he wants to know intimate details. “Did you have to train her to suck a dick right?” or “How tight is that pussy? Type A girls have the tightest pussies.”

I manage to avoid answering those questions with counter jabs. “Jealous you couldn’t get into her pants yourself?”

“No,” Reginald says to that. “I could have. I wanted you to do it so I could see what you’re made of.”

His eyes are searching; he’s testing me. All of his questions are tests. I’m under examination and I know it and I’m running out of answers to his questions.

When I’m around him, which is more and more often, I can’t show any weakness. I can’t be myself, and I can’t wear my feelings on my sleeve or anywhere else. So I suffer inside, stuffing it all down because the longer I’m in the dull gray light of purgatory, the more I miss the sun. Janie’s smile. The smell of her. The feeling I had for just a little while when I could be myself and open up to someone.

By the time Reginald drags me off to a “gentleman’s dinner” — a lavish, obscenely expensive affair wherein the shareholders and some prospective business partners all get together to eat endangered species served on platters by women wearing pasties and loin cloths, who dance when they aren’t bringing food or drinks — I can feel a tear down the center of me.