Sweet Romance12 min read
"The Moon Text, The Secret Ginseng Family, and the Message I Couldn't Ignore"
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I woke up at three in the morning to the buzz of a message.
"Don't look at the moon tonight."
I stared at my phone until my eyes watered because the sender's name made my heart clench. Lucas Mori.
"Are you drunk?" I typed back, fingers trembling with a weird half-anger, half-curiosity. "It's been three years. Why are you texting me at three a.m.?"
No reply.
I rolled over and told myself to go back to sleep. I couldn't. The message sat in my head like a pebble in a shoe.
I pulled the curtain aside.
The moon was out, full and stubbornly round.
I snapped a picture, thumbed it into the message field, and sent: "Looked. Happy now?"
His reply came almost instantly.
"You really looked."
I laughed, a dry sound that surprised me. "What, were you testing me?"
He answered with three words that felt like a scalpel: "We both lost sleep."
"Stop being cryptic," I said. "Do you know what time my interview is tomorrow? Do you have any sense?"
No reply.
I told myself he had sent the message by mistake. He had gone abroad, he had disappeared for three years, he'd never called. Of course it was a mistake.
"You're impossible," I muttered at the moon.
Two months pregnant, the doctor said the next day.
"Congratulations," the kindly obstetrician said. "You're about eight weeks along."
I left the clinic like it was a train wreck and I had seen it with my own eyes.
I thought of Lucas's message. I thought of the moon. I thought of the dozen times I had scolded him in my head over the last three years. None of it lined up.
My phone vibrated again while I was braced at the entrance of the company where I had a scheduled interview. I swallowed coffee and nerves and went in.
"Jaylee England?" a voice called, clipped and professional.
I looked up and froze.
Lucas Mori was one of the interviewers. He wore the same calm, sculpted face, the same eyes that had once made me feel like the only person in the room. He didn't smile. He didn't need to. The memory of us laughing in bed seemed absurdly private next to the corporate lighting overhead.
"Why did you text me at three a.m.?" I wanted to ask, but the polite elevator of the interview floated him into formality.
"Why do you want to work for Three Springs?" he asked.
I answered like a pro because I had rehearsed it: "Because Three Springs is one of the Fortune Five Hundred, because I admire your product strategy, because this role fits my path—"
Mid-sentence I felt a lurch.
"Excuse me," I said, and one of my rehearsed smiles collapsed into the nearest trash can by my insides. I ran from the interview room, hands pressed to my mouth.
Lucas followed me to the stairwell and, before I knew it, had me pinned against the cinder block like the world had narrowed to him and my dizzy stomach.
"You're pregnant," he said, almost too calmly. "Is it mine?"
I had enough pride to roll my eyes. "You think I carry someone else's child for three months? Get real."
He looked like he might laugh and then did not. "I didn't come back here to play games, Jaylee."
"I didn't think you cared," I snapped.
He blinked at me like I had said something new. "I came back because I couldn't forget you."
We said a lot more, and none of it made sense until I had the hospital report in my hand. Three months. Thirteen weeks. Developing well. The numbers stared at me like logic left the building.
"Someone must have drugged me," I said, to myself and to the sterile paper.
Lucas showed me a voice clip he'd recorded from the night I had been so drunk I couldn't find the floor. I heard my own slurred voice accuse him and sob, but I also heard myself pull him close, insist, "Stay. Don't leave me again." The memory flushed me with shame and something else sharp.
"You were drunk," he said. "I put you in a taxi. I stayed until you slept."
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "Why did you let me think you abandoned me for three years?"
"I was an idiot," he admitted. Then he said something I never expected: "I tried to protect you."
"Protect me from what?"
He hesitated as if he had rehearsed every answer except the truth. "From my family."
It was absurd on the face of it. Lucas had made do on scraps in college, the kind of secret poverty that made me foolishly proud when he gave me his last ten dollars. He'd always joked about the disparity between his looks and his wallet.
"Your family is rich?" I asked.
He gave a smile that was not exactly a smile. "More than rich."
"Then why tell me you were poor?"
"Because I needed you to like me for me."
"But you lied!" I shoved at him.
He flinched. "I know. I thought it would be easier. I thought I could fix it later."
It was a long conversation that ended with an awkward truce. We worked together. He became my boss. He was polite, administratively cool, and inexplicably tender when no one else could see it. He never looked at me like other people did. He looked like he remembered everything. Sometimes his hands brushed mine while we set presentation slides, and sometimes he would catch my stare and hold it for an extra beat.
"Stop staring at me like I'm going to break," I hissed once in the cafeteria.
"I stare like I used to," he murmured.
"You behaved like you forgot me."
"I didn't forget," he said.
Our office was a hive of gossip, and within days a well-dressed woman strolled through Lucas's office as if she belonged there.
"Lucas!" she purred.
I felt a small thing inside me go cold. Her name was Brianna Bertrand. She had the laugh that made everyone think she was harmless and the shoes that suggested a different kind of life.
"Brianna," Lucas said, expression unreadable.
She bounced on high heels and said too loudly, "What a surprise! I heard Lucas had a new hire. Is this the famous Jaylee?"
"Yes," someone chirped. "She was personally recommended."
Brianna came into the office, her perfume like a challenge. She smiled at me with an inherited tilt that said she owned the world.
"How do you do?" she asked, but her eyes were not on me. They were on Lucas.
"It must be nice," she whispered loudly enough for the whole office, "to be the kind of woman a man keeps hidden. Not everyone gets that."
The office shifted like a school of fish. I bristled.
"Mind your words," Lucas said softly, but his face had a set I couldn't read.
She laughed like a small bell. "He's my fiancé."
Silence stretched like taffy.
"What?" I said.
"Are you sure about that?" a colleague whispered.
Brianna's voice sharpened. "Lucas and I are engaged. We will announce it formally soon."
"I wasn't in the loop," Lucas said, almost bored.
Brianna's smile fell into something colder. "Then you will be after tonight," she said.
Later that day, she found me in the break room and skidded into my space.
"You should back off, Jaylee," she said, fingers on her phone like a warning. "If you want a job, keep your personal life quiet."
"I have a right to be here," I said, heart pounding.
"You're a distraction," she said. "And if that baby business is true, you'd better think about reputations."
Her words cut. They cut like a shovel.
I decided I would not let her win. I decided I would not be reduced to silence.
"Go ahead. Tell everyone I'm a problem," I said, harsher than I felt. "But if you bring lies into my life, I will answer in the only language these people understand."
She sniffed. "Bold."
I planned my answer over the next week. I watched her at parties. I watched her quiet smiles and the way she touched Lucas's elbow like it was a prop. I watched company gossip split the air like lightning.
Then the day came.
It was the company gala. The kind with crystal, with canapés and name tags, with people practicing their best smiles. Everyone was dressed to be photographed. I wore a dress that I thought made me look like someone who had a future. Lucas looked like someone who had been born on magazine covers.
Brianna arrived on the arm of a man with a suit made of money. Cameras clicked. Lucas was at my side, pretending to check the guest list.
"Jaylee," he said, low, "stay with me."
"Why?" I whispered.
"Because I want you where people can see you."
My solution to the Brianna problem was bold and simple. I had taken a few quiet steps during the week—copies of emails, a few recorded messages, a short conversation with the woman who managed Brianna's boutique credit accounts. I wasn't naïve; I had a plan that would make the office take notice.
I stepped onto the small platform near the band while the emcee welcomed the sponsors.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I called, voice steady, "I need a moment."
The emcee blinked, but the band was in a slow song and the lights were forgiving.
Brianna smiled like a queen. Lucas's jaw tightened. Cameras swung to me.
"This is about honesty," I said, and my voice did not falter. "About the kind of truths we choose to hide and the lies that look like silk."
Murmurs rose.
I pulled out my phone and played a short clip.
"This is Brianna Bertrand," the audio began, and it was her voice, a recording of a intercepted private message. Her words were casual and cruel. "Make sure Lucas sees the ring, okay? He has to sign the contracts, but don't let him think he's choosing me. We're buying his family."
The room went still in the way a held breath is still.
Lucas did not move.
I set the phone down and let the eyes of three hundred people slide across the screen.
"Why would she do that?" someone called.
"She wants a business alliance, not love," I said. "She wants a family name stitched to her purse."
Brianna's face shifted from smug to a startling color.
"But that's not—" she began.
"There's more," I said. I signaled to a colleague who had her own laptop open. A slideshow flicked to life on the giant screen. Invoices. Photos. A text thread. Brianna complaining about fees, arranging a "formal" announcement, counting favors like steps on a ladder.
I could feel the room focus like sunlight on one small thing.
Brianna's face crumpled. "You can't—"
"What do you want?" a board member demanded. "An apology? A retraction?"
She looked at the cameras, the board, the embarrassed staff. The air smelled like spilled champagne and the tang of humiliation.
"You used Lucas for leverage," I said, my words steady. "You called family a commodity. You ambushed his life for profit."
A chair scraped.
"She's lying!" Brianna shrieked, voice cracking. "She's making it up to ruin me."
A young analyst pushed forward with his phone and played a voicemail I had received from one of Brianna's contacts. A man's voice—Brianna's contact—said without a hint of drama, "She made a deal to propose publicly, secure the announcements, then secure the merger when the family is pressured. She asked for cameras at the engagement."
The crowd's reaction was immediate and vocal. Phones rose like a wave.
"You arranged a fake engagement?" someone asked.
"Do you realize how petty that is?" another voice said. "Do you realize how dangerous?"
Brianna's posture collapsed. She tried to salvage it—"It's not true, stop—"
"Two minutes ago you called Jaylee a distraction," Lucas said, stepping forward as the company CEO watched with a hard little smile. "You called the woman carrying his child a distraction."
Brianna's eyes flicked to Lucas. "I—"
"She is three months pregnant," Lucas said. "She is our colleague. You plotted to exploit us."
The director who ran HR—an older man who never reacted publicly—leaned into the microphone like a judge. "We will investigate. We will involve legal. But first, Brianna, do you have anything to say in your defense?"
She clung to a single thin straw. "It's—it's negotiation. It's—"
"You're fired," the CEO said like an answer that made any other words moot.
Brianna's mouth formed an 'O' that wasn't quite a sound. Around us, a ripple went through the room: some shocked, some delighted, some recording everything.
She tried to stand tall. "You can't—"
Someone in the back laughed. A few people clapped. Others shook their heads in disgust. A junior manager recorded a short video and posted it. Within ten minutes the company's private feed had split with comments and "I can't believe it" emojis.
Then the real fall came.
Brianna's father's company called—someone at the gala overheard—and the voice on the line used words that are hard to take back. Contracts were pulled, whispers became arms, and an allied brand withdrew sponsorship. People who had smiled at her for her name suddenly found reasons not to.
She left the gala with a few paid escorts and no dignity.
Outside, she broke.
"Please," she sobbed to the security guard. "I'll fix this. I'll—"
People leaned out of the doors to watch. Phones filmed. The cameras that had always liked her angle now liked the drama more. Her father did not come to pick up his daughter. Her designer brand called to tell her the show must go on without her.
She shrank into herself until her expensive dress looked like a costume someone had chosen for her, but the theater of it had turned. The audience had changed.
She tried to approach me once more, voice small and savage. "You ruined me."
"You ruined yourself," I said. "You chose to treat people like stepping stones."
Her reaction shifted: from shock to denial to anger to pleading, a quick parable of collapse. She resisted the idea of being small, but the room had decided. Cameras filmed her breakdown, colleagues whispered, and the gala's music stuttered like a train losing momentum.
It was messy and public. It was not elegant. It was the kind of scene that left marks on reputations.
Brianna begged. "Please, Lucas, you're ruining me."
Lucas put a hand on my shoulder, steady and protective. "She chose profit over people, Jaylee," he said quietly for my ears. "That's enough."
The HR director took notes. Security would escort Brianna out. People in a circle around the main door stepped back, afraid of being stained by the spectacle.
In the end she left with nothing but a few phone numbers and a pile of bad press that thrummed like angry insects across company feeds. She made the choice to be cruel and was punished through exposure and a swift professional collapse—one that would take time and money to mend, if it ever mended at all.
The crowd turned back to their drinks, to the band, to the small dramas that kept office life moving. Some applauded me. Some glanced at Lucas with new curiosity. Some shook their heads and returned to tasteless hors d'oeuvres.
I realized, as I stood there with my phone still warm in my palm, that public punishments aren't about spectacle as much as they are about truth being forced into light. I had wanted to protect myself and the child in my womb from being used. I had wanted to show the hypocrisy of a smile that hides sharp motives. The punishment was not beautiful; it was necessary.
Afterwards, as security guided a disheveled Brianna out and the cameras panned, I felt Lucas's hand find mine.
"You were brave," he said.
"I was angry," I said.
He smiled with something that didn't need words. "Both are useful."
"Did you lie to me about your family?" I asked, because honesty now mattered more than ever.
"No," he said, taking a breath that had been held too long. "I lied because I was afraid you'd see everything with the eyes other people give us. My family..." He hesitated, deadened by habit. "My family is... uncommon. They are not all human."
You might laugh at that line if you had to. I did not laugh. My life had already folded around improbable truths.
He took me to them that weekend like a man stepping into a room everyone had warned him about.
"Meet Ford Eaton," he said, and the man who stood in the doorway did not look like a patriarch; he looked like a living monument. He spoke with a rhythm that made every sentence feel like currency.
"You will like our home," Ford Eaton said, smiling as if he had expected me to be surprised to the point of speechlessness.
I saw things that did not belong in ordinary houses. A tiny creature the size of a ginkgo seed hopped across the marble floor like it had legs and a purpose. A woman with hair the color of cream and a face that could have been carved by a gentle sun smiled from the couch, and when she laughed something like the rustle of leaves came through the room.
"These are my siblings," Lucas told me.
"Your siblings are...?" I blinked.
"Part of our family is centuries old," he said. "We are half ordinary, half—" He touched my hand. "Half ginseng, Jaylee. My mother is one of them."
The idea of people who could be ginseng—root spirits that were both plant and person—was not less strange than the moon message, or the pregnancy. It fit, oddly, into the same pattern.
When I told the story to a coworker later, she asked with a smirk, "Are you saying he's literally a root?"
"He said exactly that," I told her. "And he says the child will be human."
Lucas's father explained the family history with the gravity of a banker and the tenderness of an old gardener. "We have kept to ourselves," he said. "We do not mean to shame. We mean to live."
"No shame," Lucas's mother—Aliana Gunther—said, and the voice that came from her was older than years and softer than earth. "You carry our next story."
I wanted to be angry, to test everything. But the soft patient way everyone in that house looked at me made something inside me settle.
"You'll be seen," Ford Eaton told me. "In the right light."
The weeks after the gala were a mix of normal office grind and extraordinary family dinners. Lucas became protective in the way of someone who had once been selfish and decided to change.
There were moments that made my heart flip like a coin. Little ones—he bringing me a hot drink on a cold day, his hand covering mine as if to steady me through the nausea. He smiled differently at me, not like a public announcement but like a private joke.
"Do you remember when you used to talk in your sleep?" he asked one night.
"I remember you taped me saying something embarrassing," I said.
"I liked your voice," he said.
"You liar," I laughed.
He leaned closer. "Maybe I was always in love."
"Maybe you were always impossible," I replied.
We settled into something unexpected: a partnership that had been cracked open and repaired.
There were hard choices. I had to decide what I wanted for the baby. Lucas had to decide what he wanted from his family. The world watched in its tiny way.
One day on the roof, under a moon that seemed to have forgiven nothing and everything, Lucas turned to me and said, "You asked me not to call you a distraction."
"And?"
"And I won't."
I looked at him, and through all the fiction and the truth I saw honesty. It was not a fairy tale. It was odd and clumsy and miraculous.
We chose a small wedding days later because Lucas's family thought public ceremony would settle things. Ford Eaton insisted on a handful of guests and a garden that smelled of new things. Aliana prepared a tea that tasted like something out of a dream.
I put my hand on my belly sometimes and felt the flutter that made me speechless.
In the end, what the moon started became a story about being seen—the ugly parts as much as the beautiful. The public punishment that sent Brianna stumbling away taught people about consequences. The truth about Lucas's family taught me not to be afraid of histories that look strange.
The last night before we left for the ceremony Lucas kissed my forehead and said, "If this child grows into the kind of person who root themselves and then stand tall, that'll be a life I am honored to have started."
"Don't be corny," I said, but my heart was full.
"Good," he said, smiling, as if we both agreed that the sky could do what it wanted with the moon.
The End
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