Page 125 of Everything After

Alfie took the lid of a half-empty, plastic bottle of water, and handed it to me. I swallowed the contents of it in one go and handed the empty bottle back at him without making eye contact.

After my argument with him, I’d slept the whole journey from NYC to Miami. I sensed he was annoyed with me because I’d swapped the dark feelings that had begun to swirl in my belly during our heated discussion, for some calming, white noise on an app.

Between the stress of wondering how Cody was going to perform with me and Lennie’s prissy attitude, I hadn’t beenmore nervous in years of making a mistake because during a live performance there was no do-over.

Lennie’s obtuse reaction to me being pregnant had made me feel like I had to prove I was worthy of my position in the band all over again, when me being pregnant shouldn’t even have been a thing.

Alfie hadn’t helped when he later commented on Lennie’s offhand behavior either.

Luckily, the plane landed, and as Oscar distracted Alfie, I took that opportunity to go to the washroom and splash water on my face. I dabbed it dry with a paper towel and stared at myself in the mirror.

“Alfie’s right. Who gives a fuck what Lennie thinks? This is about me and my family,” I said to myself aloud, sounding more determined now. Crumpling up the paper towel in one hand, I discarded it and went back to my husband.

Alfie flew us back in his helicopter as I suspected he might, and as far as I was concerned, the quicker we got home the better. As we travelled in silence, I considered he was likely still mad that I’d ended our argument earlier.

Having no wish to add fuel to the fire, I muttered that I wasn’t feeling all that great and I couldn’t wait to lie down, then I stayed silent for the rest of the trip. The moment we landed and had gotten inside our home, I went straight upstairs to bed.

“Yeah,” I heard Alfie say when I woke in darkness, in the middle of the night, disorientated and alarmed. I stared at the time on the nightstand clock which said 2:46 a.m. My anxiety went through the roof when Alfie sat up and said my mum’s name.

“Where did you see it, Roslyn?”

“See what? What’s wrong?” I asked, shifting to a sitting position.

Ignoring me, Alfie reached for his laptop which was on his nightstand and opened it up. The glow from the screen instantly brightened the room.

“What’s the name?” he asked. He listened for a sec then said, “Yeah, I know of him. Look, Roslyn, we’ll call you back in a few minutes,” he advised her, and hung up.

“Did you just hang up on my mum? What did she want? Is my dad alright?” I asked more urgently, climbing onto my knees. I sat back on my heels. “Alfie?”

“Your mom called to tell me that influencer, Pedro Compton has done a blind item on us that’s gaining traction.”

“What is she doing watching a gossip columnist?”

“She’s on call and was scrolling through TikTok. It must have come up on her ‘For You Page’.”

“Christ, and she called us during the night? I thought it was something serious,” I mumbled, crawling back into bed and curling up in the fetal position to go back to sleep. “If I had a dime for every time one of these gossip columnists makes up stories about us, I’d have bought a yacht and sailed around the world by now.”

“It’s 7:50 a.m. now where she is,” he reminded me, after glancing down at the time on his laptop.

“Go back to sleep, it’s probably some ridiculous rumor he’s spreading. We’ll let our personal PR assistant, Joanne, and my new guy from legal deal with it in the morning. We won’t use yours because of her ties to XrAid’s team, not when there could be a conflict of interest,” he explained. “Found it,” Alfie said, ignoring me.

“Hello, your friend Pedro Compton here, the king of social media, an original influencer, and your number one source for anything to report on Mr. and Mrs. Black. Today I have a doozy for y’all that no one saw coming… well maybe we did, and we just didn’t want to blow up the fairy tale.”

“Come on spit out the bullshit so we all can go back to sleep,” Alfie gritted out to the screen.

“My extremely well-placed inside source recently attended an exclusive, celebrity-filled party hosted by the Blacks at their island home, and by their account all is allegedly less than Zen in the Black household. Now, let’s get into it.”

“Someone at our party?” Alfie mused while he stared at the laptop.

I opened my eyes suddenly, giving the media gossip more of my attention since he’d mentioned the party. Very few had known about the event, which had been kept low-key and only those closest to us had been present.

“I don’t know if any of y’all noticed this…” Pedro continued dramatically, holding out a hand. The screen cut to a stilled image of the video footage from the talk show the night before. My baby bump that I’d thought I’d concealed well, clearly showing, but circled for the media viewers with a huge red ring around it.

My heart sank like a stone from my chest to my stomach, that some random guy on social media was outing my condition before Alfie and I’d had the chance to do it ourselves.

Alfie paused the screen. “Well, if that’s all it is, there’s nothing to deny,” Alfie muttered, turning to look at me.

“No matter how hard we try, we can never get ahead of the curve with those guys,” I mumbled.