The paper inside smells faintly like home, or maybe that’s my brain trying to find comfort in this strange new world I’m suddenly in. I flip past “Polpette,” past “Zuppa,” to the back, where I had hidden something no one can know I’m keeping.
The note he left.
Panini.
I trace the letters with my thumb, and that is a mistake. Heat climbs my neck, shame riding shotgun with it. I slip the note back and close the tin as if the sound of the lid will snap me back to reality.
But this is my reality now.
I sit there with the tin in my lap and let the next round of lists play out.
Options.
Option one: I end the pregnancy. It is a clinical decision with a clinical outcome. No one has to know. I can drive out of town again.
I can say I had food poisoning or the flu, or nothing at all. I can go back to my desk and pretend I am in the process of losing something I didn’t even let myself want because wanting it would break me.
I can tell myself that would be the smart move because it keeps the case clean and my career intact.
I imagine that, and my stomach turns over on itself.
Option two: I carry it and give it up. Adoption. A legal solution to a moral situation. I could even tell myself it’s noble. It would also be a lifetime of wondering where a pair of eyes like mine resided and if she likes pepper in her food, or if she laughs the way my mother did when I said something I thought was smart, but wasn’t. I would need to be stronger than I am, though, in order to choose this option.
Option three: I have the baby. I keep my job or I don’t. I tell the truth or I don’t. I move to a different office, or I quit and find something else to do, because I can never walk the same halls again without the whispers following me. Hell, they wouldn’t letme walk those halls, anyway. I end up being the woman who did the worst thing she could have done—betray her oath.
I breathe.
My career is over. It keeps looping because fear has grooves, and my mind keeps falling into them.
But the words feel less like a sentence and more like a test whenever I find myself considering them.
If my career depends on me being the moral and upstanding person I always thought I was, then yes. It’s over.
If the rules I am sworn to follow can perhaps bend and not break, maybe it isn’t. Maybe some things end so other things can begin.
That sounds like something people say in order to feel better about surviving messes of their own making. I don’t like it.
And it’s just not true.
I pull my legs up under me and tuck the blanket around my ankles. The tin sits on the cushion next to my thigh.
I don’t cry. Not because I’m so strong that I don’t need to. I just… don’t.
The feeling is there, a pressure behind my breastbone that wants release. But tears feel like a luxury right now, like time I can’t spend wallowing in self-pity.
I put the edge of the tin under my palm and press until the corner bites my skin and gives me something to feel.
A different list slides in. A practical one, the way my brain often tries to save me when my emotions won’t—or can’t.
Call the OB from the card the nurse gave me. Ask if they do early ultrasounds. Figure out insurance; my plan is good, but I won’t be able to keep it if they fire me.
Buy prenatals today. Eat something with protein. No more coffee—how am I going to get by without coffee?
Make a separate list of things I have to stop eating and put it on the fridge. Caffeine down. Wine gone. The bottle on the table is half full and sits there mocking me, daring me to drink it.
I stand up, carry it to the sink, and pour it out.
Back to the couch. Back to the phone. The nurse said I could call with questions. I have too many and none I can actually ask. The two people I want to speak to the most are the ones I can’t contact.
