In the days after that test, the pregnancy was a secret I clutched to my chest. Like some kind of light I had to protect. I knew what my sister would say.

Oh, Abby…

And she would say it in that tone. Slightly disapproving. Slightly disappointed. But loving all the same, like she had—in some way—expected something like this from me.

And maybe, just maybe she was surprised that it hadn’t happened earlier.

But it couldn’t have happened earlier. Because no man ever got to me like Jack had. No one would have made me forget to use a condom. No one would have turned me so inside out with desire and grief and the ghostly start of love, that I would forget to protect myself.

I cried the next few days. In my apartment. On the BART. In storage closets in the bar where Maria, Sun, and I were working.

I cried because I was so fucking scared.

And so fucking sad.

And… so fucking happy.

Seriously. Happy. Having this baby could not be bigger problem in my life. A bigger mistake. I had no clue what to do.

But this light I clutched to my chest in the darkness of all that—it was a happy light.

It was an excited light. More than I could have anticipated. More than I could have imagined.

I was going to have a baby.

There wasn’t a place I could make for Jack in this situation, not with the secrets and lies. But at the same time this light… this light was so fucking beautiful. And I was alone and I was scared and I wanted to share this. And I wanted to share it with Jack. The joy and the fear.

That was normal, right?

So, in bed, propped up on my pillows, a month pregnant, I took a deep breath and did as he asked that morning in his kitchen. I texted Jack:

We need to talk. It’s important.

And the second I sent the text I felt better. I felt less alone, like the burden and the guilt and the fear were not solely on my shoulders. And I fell asleep for the first time in a month feeling like things were going to be all right.

* * *

The next morning at eight a.m. I leapt from my bed to find nothing from him on my phone. No text. No voice mail. Nothing. I collapsed backward onto my couch, surprised at how upset I was. How betrayed. He’d kicked me out of his house, what did I actually think he was going to do? Rush to my aid, hold my hand?

Yes. A little.

Dumb Abby.

I’d spent the last few weeks believing he, like me, was lying in bed staring at his phone, my number on the screen and his thumb just barely lifted off the side, paused there, stuck in indecision. In that gray place between hope and fear.

I imagined him in that gray space with me.

And this—this crisis—would bring us both out of that gray space. It would bring us back to each other.

But by Friday afternoon, I realized that was just a dream. A fantasy that wasn’t going to happen. The truth was, he kicked me out of his house and he didn’t look back, and now I was pregnant.

And I was going to figure this out on my own.

I didn’t even bother to text him again. I put him out of my head with more success than I’d ever had. I closed off all roads back to him. I put a tourniquet around the bleeding.

And in the quiet and the hush of my apartment in the middle of the night, I put my hands over my stomach.

“All right,” I whispered. “What are we going to do?”

It wasn’t going to be easy. My job didn’t have insurance and Charlotte made me sign up for the ACA, but that didn’t cover everything.

The money I had put aside would keep me going for a few months if the whole birth went okay. If not, I’d be burning through my money in no time.

And after that, it wasn’t like I could keep working in bars. The hours were ridiculous.

Tomorrow I would go talk to Vanessa in the offices of Elegance Hospitality, and I’d talk to her about that office job she kept trying to give me.

And my sister… I would tell my sister and I wouldn’t be alone. And I’d just… fucking do this.

I smiled up at my ceiling. Sure of nothing except for the fact that this was right. This was the thing I was supposed to do.

I rolled over to my side and the tears trickling from my eyes rolled over my lips and they tasted bittersweet.

I woke up late Saturday morning, near noon. The sun slicing across my room, over my bed. I tested myself, pressed on all my fears and all my plans and everything held. Nothing crumbled. My eyes didn’t burn. My heart didn’t hurt.

Jack was out of my life.

And I was keeping the baby.

I ached, with a kind of distant grief, but it was tempered with hope. A kind of excitement that felt like the sunshine through my window, warming me up in pieces.

In the kitchen I grabbed my phone to call my sister but I had a voice mail message from an unknown number.

Delivered at 4:30 a.m.

Everything about it felt strange. And dread crept up along the edges of my newfound hope.

I pressed play and bit back a sob when Jack’s voice came whispering through my phone.

“Abby,” he said, his voice cracked and worn. Tired. “I got your message and I’m sorry I didn’t call. I’m sorry…” There was a muffled shout on his end of the phone. “I’m sorry for a lot of things, but I’m not sorry for that weekend with you. I’m not sorry for touching you and for holding you. I’m not sorry for dreaming just for a few days that I had a future with a woman like you. I love you, Abby. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s the realest thing in my life. I love you. And something… something is going down tonight, and if it ends the way I think it’s going to, Patty at the club has a package for you. Be safe, Abby. Be happy.”

The message ended and my heart in my throat, I stared at my phone like it could tell me more. I listened again, trying to get some kind of proof that disproved this feeling in my gut. That would alleviate this fear rising in my throat.

Jack left a message because he thought he was going to die.

That was obvious, right? Clear to everyone?

He was saying goodbye.

I listened to the message again, and again, trying to convince myself to not be so dramatic, but the feeling only got worse.

Wherever he was at four a.m. Whatever he’d been doing, he believed he only had a few minutes to live. And in those minutes he called me.

To tell me he loved me.

Jesus, I thought. For the first time in years, I fumbled in my bedside table for my inhaler. I took puffs until I could breathe again. Oh my God.

I called the number back but it was dead. An electronic buzzing scraped at my ears.

What was I supposed to do? Who did I call? The cops?

Quickly I turned on the TV, looking for news. I scrolled through Twitter, looking for any mention of murder on the streets of San Francisco.

There was nothing.

Was he still alive?

The image of him dying somewhere, lying on his back, bleeding into asphalt. Hurt. Scared. Crying. Thinking of me.

I sobbed, dropping the phone.

My knees buckled and I fell down on my kitchen floor.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Think. Think.

I reached for my phone, dropping it once with shaking fingers. I scrolled through my texts and found one from Patty. I called her.

“Hello?” Patty answered on the second ring.

“Patty?”

“Who is this?” she asked, immediately panicked because my voice was so fucking freaked out and wild. I was sobbing and couldn’t breathe and I tried to calm myself down.

“It’s Abby. From Elegance.”

“Yeah, honey, what’s wrong?”

“I’m looking for Jack.”

“I haven’t seen him for two days. I haven’t seen any of them for two days. Bates and Jack and Sammy, even Lazarus and every other asshole in a suit in this place took off Thursday afternoon, and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Jack said he left something for me behind the bar.”

“Well, I’m heading there now. I’ll call you when I get there.”

“Okay, thank you.”

I hung up and stood in my kitchen, wondering how long it would take her to get back to me because every second was century.

My phone buzzed in my hand and I stopped breathing with the hope that it was a text from Jack. It was just an email, some spam from a dress store I loved, something I should have known by the tone of the beep. But I stared down at my texts and saw the one from Bates.

The one offering me a job.

The one I didn’t respond to but I didn’t delete either.

Bates.

Bates would know where Jack was. Bates was with Jack.

Texting him had the flavor of a mistake, but the weight of not knowing was too much. And frankly, if something happened, something serious, I had to doubt he’d answer.

But I couldn’t stop myself from trying.

I texted:

This is Abby. I’m looking for Jack. I just want to know he’s okay.

Immediately the bouncing dots indicating a return text showed up and my brain buzzed with sudden hope. With a wild relief and panic. Within seconds the balloon of his returning text appeared.

Meet me at the club in a half hour.

Is Jack okay? I texted.

There was no response.

I gaped at my phone and then sobbed hard. Once.

I didn’t think twice. I called an Uber (sorry Jack), put my shoes on, and headed out to the club. It was Saturday, just after noon, and I was in a pair of baggy yoga pants, a tank top and a cream sweater pulled over it. My hair was pulled back into two braids, coming undone in a halo around my face.

There was no plan in my head, no conversation I could map out. I had my purse, my keys, and my inhaler, and all I needed was to see Jack.

Because he loved me.

I’m not sorry for dreaming just for a few days that I had a future with a woman like you. I love you, Abby. It doesn’t make sense but it’s the realest thing in my life. I love you.

I mean, I’m not so stupid that I didn’t realize he said those things because he’d been scared. Probably thought he was dying.

But the words swung inside me, gaining momentum. Like a kid on a swing set thinking if they pumped hard enough they’d get the swing to go all the way around the posts.

He was scared, sure. Yes. But the feeling was real. I knew that because the feeling was real in me too.

The ride to the Moonlight took roughly seven thousand years. I sat in the back of some stranger’s Honda Civic praying, actually praying between puffs from my inhaler. Tasting blood because I was biting my lips.

Just let him be alive. Just let him be alive. Just let him be alive.

There was nothing to wish for after that. No room for any other thought. If he was alive, the rest would take care of itself.

* * *

The driver dropped me in front of the club, which in the daylight looked like any other night club during the day.

A little seedy.

A little forgotten.

The front door was locked. So was the side door, so I ran around back to the alley. It had rained at some point while my world was ending, and my feet splashed through puddles. The spray splattering my legs.

The back door was open, and it felt like seven hundred years ago that I’d watched Jack kick out the guy with the horrible shirt. It felt like something that had happened to a different person.

I pulled hard on the heavy door before stepping into the dark back hallway. I ran past the bathroom where I’d caught Jack praying and cleaning off the blood of the man he’d put in the hospital. I ran past the dressing room mirrors where Sun, Maria, and I had argued about how the men running this place were or were not gangsters, where we’d checked our makeup and done our hair before everything fell to shit.

I felt like I ran past every version of the person I’d been. Shedding all of that like a skin.

It was like what Jack had said about himself three years ago, that version of him was a story he’d heard about another person.

Panting, I pulled open the door that read Private across the glass and burst into the wide open club.

“Hello!” I cried, my voice echoing through the empty space.

Patty’s head poked up from behind the bar. “Hey!” she said. “Where did you come from?”

“Back door was open.”

She shook her head, swearing under her breath. “Here,” she said as I approached the bar. “Jack left this for you.”

She put a heavy manila envelope on the bar and pushed it toward me.

It was money. I knew before opening it. It was a stack of cash.

“Is he here?” I asked. The money still on the counter. I wasn’t going to touch it. I was never going to touch it. That money was covered in blood. Covered in Jack’s blood.

Vomit crawled up my throat.

“No fucking clue,” she said. “Someone is upstairs though. I’ve been hearing a lot of noise. And…” she tilted her head to the end of the bar, where a beautiful Chinese woman in a sleek black rain coat sat drinking a cup of coffee.

She turned and looked at us, her smile a fucking blade. Like danger just…sat beside her.

“I’m with Bates,” she said quietly.

Patty and I nodded, like that made sense.

I turned to look at the staircase, the black eye of the windows.

“I gave my notice,” Patty said. “My advice, if you want it?”

I didn’t.

“Don’t go up there,” Patty said. “Take this stack of money and run far away from this place and Jack Herrara.”

“I will. I am,” I breathed. Because that was the smart thing to do. The thing I should do. I just had to find out if he was alive first.

“But you’re going up those stairs, right?”

I nodded, because I couldn’t speak.

Because I was reckless. And not very smart.

And in love.

“Good fucking luck to you,” she said and walked away, leaving me to climb those stairs on my own.

Silent, I went up those stairs. I climbed them like air. Like wind. Like I wasn’t there. I had no desire to be heard. To be seen. I wanted to make sure he was alive and then get the hell out of this place.

Go back to my plan. The baby and me.

At the same time I wanted to grab Jack, if he was here, pull him out of this world and into mine. Run with him, all the way to Idaho. Where we’d get our feet under us. We’d figure each other out. We’d have a baby.

I put a hand over my mouth, so I wouldn’t make a sound.

The door opened when I turned the doorknob and I found myself in another hallway, surprisingly long and very dark. The end of it opened into another room bathed in mellow light. My angle wasn’t the best and I couldn’t see anyone in that room, but I could hear voices. Low murmurs.

A sudden shout.

I flinched at the noise and reached behind me for the doorknob, unclear on how I’d been so stupid to come up here.

I knew better than this.

“Jesus, Bates!” It was Jack’s voice.

Relief made me giddy. Relief made my legs buckle and my heart leap and I put my hand against the wall so I wouldn’t fall over.

“Don’t do this,” Jack said, and in his voice I heard fear. I heard pain.

“It’s already done,” Bates said. “You do it, or I will.”

And suddenly I wasn’t just walking down the hallway toward his voice, I was practically running. Silent as I could be, I crept along the wall, staying hidden by the angle of the doorway as best I could.

I pulled my phone out of my purse and dialed 9 and 1, my thumb poised over the second 1 if I needed it.

The closer I got to the door the better I could hear everyone.

“Those are your choices,” Bates said.

I leaned forward until I saw Lazarus’s office. It looked like any other office, a wide wooden desk, couches along the side, walls full of non-descript artwork and there, in the middle of the room, was a large man I’d never seen.

On his knees.

Was that Lazarus, I wondered? It had to be.

Standing beside him was Jack.

Bates stood in front of them by the desk, his sleeves rolled up. His knuckles red and bleeding. His pale blond hair falling into his face. Now he looked young. So young. Impossibly young.

“Pay the debt,” Bates said to Jack. “And you’re free to go.”

“My debt isn’t to you,” Jack said.

“It is now.”

“I’m supposed to trust you?” Jack whispered.

“Do you have a choice?” Bates asked and Jack was silent, standing there with his shoulders rigid under his jacket.

“Kill him and you’re free,” Bates said. “All debts paid.”

I put my hand over my mouth, trying to hold back my gasping moan. My heart was thundering in my ears and I wondered how no one could hear me. My fear was the loudest thing on the planet.

“Jack,” the man on the floor said, his voice garbled. He turned slightly to spit on the floor and I saw his beaten, raw face. “Don’t believe him. You can’t trust him. Look at what he’s doing to me.”

“I’m doing this to you,” said Bates in a quiet voice, “because you’re a piece of shit.”

“And what are you?” the beaten man spat. “What gutter did you crawl out of?”

Bates stepped forward and crouched down in the beaten man’s face. “All of them. Every gutter. Gutters you’ve never even heard of. Gutters so dark. So dirty you can’t even fathom them.”

“This is about those cunts—”

Jack smashed his fist into the man’s jaw, knocking him onto the rug. I jerked back into the shadows, tears squeezing out beneath my eyelids.

“Another word about those women and I’ll kill you with my bare hands,” Jack said in a voice I’d never heard before.

I leaned forward in time to see Bates grab a gun and point it at the man on his knees, but he was looking at Jack.

“Kill him or I will, and then you’ll never be free.”

Jack raised his arm, and for the first time I saw the gun he was holding and I could tell, I could tell looking at him that the gun was not empty. It had a silencer on the end. Ominous and chilling.

On the floor the beaten man put his hands up, cowering from the rage on Jack’s face.

No, I thought, shaking my head in the shadows, sick and crying and biting my lips until they bled. This was not Jack. Not the man I knew.

“Jack,” the man cried, reaching for hem of Jack’s rain-splattered coat. “I’m begging you. I have children—”

“So did those women, motherfucker,” Bates said.

Jack pulled the trigger.

Despite the silencer it was loud. So loud the night ripped open and I might have screamed. I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was that Lazarus hit the floor, blood pooling around his broken body. A hole in his forehead.

I tore my eyes away from the horror and found Bates staring right at me. I’d jumped at the gunfire, out of the shadows and into the well-lit doorway.

He saw me.

I didn’t give Jack a second glance, because in that heartbeat, that blood-soaked moment when he pulled the trigger, he wasn’t my Jack. He wasn’t anyone I knew.

My instincts kicked in and I ran.