Chapter 8: The Question at Dawn
The dawn air was cool and carried the clean, petrichor scent of last night’s rain. Leah stood on the penthouse balcony, her hands wrapped around a ceramic mug of coffee she hadn’t sipped. Below, the city was a slow exhalation of gray and gold, windows catching the first light like scattered embers. She’d been awake for hours, listening to Leo’s steady breathing, feeling the ghost of a cramp—phantom now, a memory of pain—low in her abdomen.
The sliding door whispered open behind her. She didn’t turn. Leo came to stand beside her at the railing, his own mug in hand. He wore sweatpants and a thin cotton shirt, his hair mussed from sleep. For a long minute, they just watched the light bleed across the skyline, the silence between them a fragile, shared thing.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked finally, his voice gravelly.
“A bit,” she said. “You?”
“Same.” He took a gulp of coffee. “Kept thinking about the roses.”
She glanced at him. His profile was sharp against the brightening sky. He was referencing her numb comment from the car last night, about her mother and a June wedding. Testing the waters.
“They’d have to be Paestums,” she said, playing along with the script. “Or maybe Queen of Sweden. Mom thinks pink is too informal, though. She’ll want white. Always white.”
“Screw the white,” Leo said, not looking at her. “Get the pink ones. Get neon orange ones if you want.”
The edge in his voice was new. Or maybe it was old, something from before the polish. She traced a chip in the glaze of her mug. “It’s not about the roses, Leo.”
“I know.” He let out a long breath, clouding in the cool air. “I know it’s not.”
The city hum was a low, constant vibration. A delivery truck beeped faintly far below. The jasmine vine clinging to a trellis nearby released a sweet, desperate fragrance into the damp morning.
He turned to face her, leaning his hip against the railing. The casual pose was strained. “Last night… what the doctor said. It changes things.”
“Does it?” Her voice was quieter than she intended. She finally took a sip. The coffee was bitter, gone lukewarm.
“It has to,” he said, frustration tightening his words. “Leah, we… we almost had a kid. A kid we didn’t plan for, didn’t expect, but…” He shook his head, searching for the right words. “For a second, it was real. And now it’s not. And we’re just… going back to discussing flower arrangements like it was a… a scheduling conflict?”
“What would you have me do?” she asked, meeting his eyes. There was no challenge in it, just exhaustion. “Should we sit in the dark and grieve something we never knew we had? Should I start knitting tiny socks? What’s the protocol, Leo? No one gave us the manual for this.”
He flinched. She saw it, a quick twitch near his eye. He looked away, out over the waking city. “You’re right. Sorry.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I just feel like I’m going to explode if I have to listen to my father talk about merger timelines today. Like none of it matters.”
“It matters,” Leah said softly. “It’s your life.”
“Is it?” The question hung there, raw and sudden. He gestured vaguely at the panoramic view, the immense, privileged space around them. “Or is it just the life that’s happening to me? To us?”
The ‘us’ landed between them, heavy with implication. Leah set her mug down on the wide stone railing. The chill of the stone seeped into her palms. She thought of the blood on the silk, the clinical green of the hospital room, the way he’d held her in the chair all night, as if she might dissolve.
Leo pushed off the railing, pacing a short, tight path on the balcony. “I keep thinking about what the doctor said. ‘It’s no one’s fault.’ She meant it to be comforting. But it just feels… random. Like we got a glimpse of a door, and then it slammed shut in our faces. And now we’re supposed to just walk down the hallway like we never saw it.”
He stopped pacing, his back to her. His shoulders were tense. “Do you want children?”
The question, when it came, wasn’t gentle. It was direct, a bullet in the quiet morning. It was the question underneath every other question, the one they’d always danced around with hypotheticals and ‘somedays.’
Leah’s hands, still on the cold stone, trembled. She willed them to stop. She saw the ghost of his scar in her mind’s eye, the thin white line on his wrist. A mark from a past fracture. This felt like another one, happening in real time.
“Why are you asking me that? Now?” Her voice was thin.
“Because I need to know.” He turned to face her. His eyes were dark, intense. “I need to know if you looked at that possibility—that terrifying, messy, not-in-the-plan possibility—and felt… relief when it was gone.”
The accusation wasn’t in his words, but in the space around them. He was asking if she was just playing a part. The demure fiancée. The willing vessel for the Carrington legacy. The script.
Anger, hot and surprising, flashed through her. It burned away the numbness. “How dare you,” she whispered.
He blinked, taken aback.
“How dare you stand there in your five-thousand-square-foot penthouse and ask me if I felt relieved.” She stepped toward him, the tremor gone from her hands, replaced by a cold, clear steadiness. “You have no idea what I felt. No idea. You were scared. I was terrified. Not of a baby, Leo. Of you. Of this.” She swept her arm around, encompassing the balcony, the city, the unseen world of expectations below. “Of what happens to a person inside a gilded cage. I looked at that… that fleeting chance of something else, something ours, and yes, for one second, it was beautiful. And in the very next second, it was the most terrifying thing I’d ever imagined. Because it would have been real. And nothing about this—” she gestured between them, at the space filled with unspoken contracts and family dinners, “—feels real yet.”
Leo stared at her, his mouth slightly open. The polished charm was utterly gone, stripped away by her words. He looked young, and wounded, and genuinely shocked.
She wasn’t done. “So don’t you ask me if I want children. Ask me if I want a life. A real one. Ask me if I want to be Leah, or just Mrs. Carrington. Ask me if I felt relief.” Her breath hitched. “I felt grief, Leo. For something I didn’t get to choose. Just like I didn’t choose any of this.”
The air between them crackled. The sun had cleared the distant hills now, washing his face in uncompromising light. She saw the struggle in his jaw, the conflict in his eyes. He was trying to fit her outburst into the narrative he knew—the quiet Leah, the agreeable Leah.
He took a step toward her. Then another. He didn’t reach for her. He just stood close, his coffee forgotten on the railing. “You didn’t choose me?”
The vulnerability in the question disarmed her. The anger seeped away, leaving something raw and aching. “I chose you,” she said, her voice breaking. “I just don’t know what ‘you’ is yet. Underneath all… this.”
He was silent for a long moment. A breeze picked up, carrying the scent of jasmine and distant traffic. Finally, he spoke, his words slow and deliberate. “I looked at it, too. That possibility. And for a second, I wasn’t Leo Carrington, heir to the fucking empire. I was just… a guy. Whose girlfriend was pregnant.” He swallowed. “It was the most free I’ve felt in years.”
The confession hung there, more intimate than any touch they’d shared last night.
Leah felt the truth of it echo inside her. It was the same treacherous flicker of freedom she’d felt, followed by the avalanche of fear. They had seen the same door.
He reached out then, his hand cupping her cheek. His palm was warm. “I don’t want you to be just Mrs. Carrington.”
“Then who do you want me to be?”
“Someone who yells at me on a balcony at dawn,” he said, a faint, ragged smile touching his lips. “Someone who tells me the truth. Even when it scares the hell out of me.”
She leaned into his touch, closing her eyes for a second. The city’s heartbeat thrummed through the stone. “It scares me, too.”
“Okay,” he whispered. He rested his forehead against hers. They stood like that, breathing the same air, as the world woke up around them. The script was in ashes at their feet. The path ahead was uncharted, and terrifyingly blank.
Leo pulled back just enough to look into her eyes. “No pink roses,” he said, his voice firm. “We’re getting the neon orange ones.”
A shaky laugh escaped her, part sob, part release. “Your mother will have a stroke.”
“Good,” he said. He kissed her forehead, a simple, solid promise. Then he turned, picking up his cooling coffee. He looked out at the city, his shoulders set differently. “I’m canceling my meetings today. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go be nobody somewhere. Just for a day.”
Leah watched him, this man who was both the gilded cage and the desperate bird inside it. She picked up her own mug. The coffee was cold and bitter. She poured it over the railing, watching the dark liquid vanish into the greenery below.
“Okay,” she said.