Chapter 3

Dylan didn't come with me to the checkup.

At seven that morning, he texted:

"Something came up. Eugene will go with you."

At nine, standing in the hospital hallway, I scrolled past Hazel's post.

A photo of a VIP-room breakfast, and in the corner, Dylan's cufflink.

When the checkup was over, the doctor asked:

"Where's the family?"

"Busy," I said.

The doctor frowned.

"A pregnant woman isn't a machine."

Eugene came toward me.

"Mr. Delgado wants to know… how did the checkup go?"

"Why can't he ask himself?"

Back home, my illustrations were spread across the study desk.

The picture book I'd spent half a year on, Home to the Clouds.

Grandma always said:

"A woman needs a path of her own."

I'd poured everything into this book.

In the story, little Cloud clutches a worn-out bunny, makes it through wind and rain, and finally finds a small house of her own.

The bunny stitched onto my bag, Grandma made that for me by hand.

I'd sent the illustrations to Dylan once. I'd sent him voice memos, too.

I said:

"The bunny isn't a toy. It's the way home."

"My parents died when I was little, and whenever I was scared, Grandma would press the bunny into my hands and tell me I wasn't a child nobody wanted."

Three hours later, Dylan replied with a single word.

"Mm."

I thought he hadn't listened.

Until the editor from the publishing house called.

"Peggy, what's going on with that Delgado teaser?"

"How did Hazel become the lead creator?"

"What?"

"Home to the Clouds got renamed Hazel's Moon House. You didn't know?"

I opened the livestream.

Hazel sat onstage, her eyes a little red.

"This book is tied to something from my childhood."

She said that as a girl she'd been afraid of the dark, that there was an old bunny that kept her company, that it wasn't a toy, it was the way home.

Cold spread through me.

Every word she said came from the voice memos I'd sent Dylan.

On the stream, Hazel froze on the page about the old bunny.

The camera panned to the audience.

Dylan sat in the front row and quietly prompted her.

"It's the way home."

So he hadn't failed to understand.

He'd understood the small ache I'd hidden in those pictures.

And he'd taken that understanding and used it to coach Hazel through a performance of tender feeling.

I rushed to the launch, but security stopped me.

"Sorry, you don't have an invitation."

"I'm the original author."

Dylan came out.

"Come with me."

In the lounge, I laid the original manuscript, the emails, and the raw voice files in front of him.

"Is that enough?"

Dylan glanced down at them.

"I know."

The cold went through me.

"Then why did you still put her onstage?"

"Hazel just came back to the country. People are already talking about her."

"She can't have another scandal."

He paused, then added:

"This involves several companies. If you make a scene now, everyone looks bad."

"And me? What about my name?"

"How am I supposed to get work after this?"

"Peggy, I'm protecting the project."

I laughed in spite of myself.

"You strip my name off it and call that protecting the project?"

He looked away from me.

"That voice memo was only creative reference."

"Reference?"

I pointed at Hazel on the screen outside.

"She took the bunny my grandma sewed for me and called it her own childhood."

"Dylan, you handed her my wound and put her onstage to cry over it."

He was silent for a moment.

"She doesn't understand the heart of it. I was helping her get into the feeling."

I asked, "Whose feeling?"

"My parents dying young, Grandma sewing that bunny, me holding it and crying in the middle of the night, those are mine."

"You treated my wound like her research material?"

His face finally went pale for a second.

Hazel's voice came from outside the door:

"Dylan, the media are asking for details, I'm a little scared…"

Dylan turned almost at once.

I grabbed his sleeve.

"If you walk out there today, every word she says onstage is spoken over my name."

He looked back.

"Then just do me this one favor."

"And if I don't?"

His eyes went cold.

"The statement's already out."

"You rush out there now, and people will only say the pregnant woman lost her mind."

I let go of his sleeve.

He pushed the door open and said to Hazel:

"Don't be afraid. I'm here."

That night, the Delgado Foundation's statement shot to the top of the trending list.

"Ms. Winfield was merely a research assistant. The circulating claims about the original author are false."

A project editor also quietly forwarded me screenshots from the "Hazel Project" group chat.

In them, Dylan had forwarded my voice memo into the group.

Underneath it, he'd added a line:

"This is the old bunny story Peggy once told me. Hazel, get familiar with the emotion first. Don't read it off word for word, tell it as your own experience."

A few minutes later, Hazel replied:

"Understood."

"Dylan, I know how to make it sound more like my own now."

So it wasn't that he couldn't understand my loneliness.

He just took my loneliness and used it to make someone else look good.