Sleep doesn’t take me; it hovers like a nurse with a clipboard. After ten minutes of counting backwards and not getting to zero, I slip out from under Jason’s arm. He murmurs something that sounds like my name and doesn’t move. The floor is cool under my feet. Rain drums a softer pattern now, like fingers on a countertop.
In the bathroom, the mirror startles up my face—flushed, calm enough to pass, not calm enough to convince me. I shut the door until the latch kisses, keep the light low, and sit on the edge of the tub with my phone face-down on my knee. The fan would be loud enough to keep secrets, but the sound makes me feel like I can’t breathe, so I leave it off.
I flip the phone and open the little pink app I only think about for thirty seconds a day. It blooms in cheerful fonts like it’s selling smoothies. The calendar pops up—dots and petals and a highlighted ring I don’t want to touch. My last entry glows politely. Late blinks beside it as if it’s a badge I won’t be allowed to wear through security.
The room tilts a quiet degree. Math unspools—travel days, the night I worked through lift because Kitson’s hip flexor was a diva, the weekend the coffee shop closed early and my body obeyed the calendar anyway. The app offers a suggestion banner in pastel:Take a test when 3–5 days late.I am whatever comes after that.
I open the cabinet because doing is always better than thinking. Mouthwash, cotton rounds, a first-aid kit with a broken latch, a neatly stacked pyramid of hotel shampoos I swear I didn’t steal. On the second shelf, behind a box of cold medicine and a heating pad, sits the slim white box I haven’t let myself reach for in two years. I pull it out and read the side anyway, like the instructions might be different this time.
The box is empty.
“Of course,” I whisper, and hear the laugh hitch in it. I check again like cardboard can grow contents if I look sternly enough. Nothing. I sit back on my heels and close my eyes. Breathe in four, out six. It only makes the edges sharper.
Across the street, through the slice of window over the sink, the pharmacy sign glows red and blue under the rain.CLOSEDpulses in a reasonable font, the kind of calm that makes you want to argue. A trickle of people moves under umbrellas, glossy beetles in the wet light. I picture myself in a hood, crossing, pushing the door and finding it locked, my face reflected in the glass with the neon laid over my eyes.
The app waits in my palm with more cheerful advice.Track symptoms?it offers. I could give it data: nausea playing peekaboo at practice, the way coffee tasted like pennies this morning, the sudden heat that flushed my skin on the couch before fear put its hand on my throat. None of it is proof. All of it is a shape I recognize from a life I haven’t let myself imagine in years.
I put the empty box back where I found it because pretending I didn’t look feels like a kind of safety. The cardboard whispers against plastic. I wash my hands because I need the sound, warm water loud in the small room, and watch the drops bead on my knuckles the way Jason traced them earlier.
In the mirror, I practice the smile that didn’t reach my eyes and still doesn’t. I try on a neutral face for the seven a.m. room. Neither looks like me.
The rain picks up, tapping impatient fingers on the window. I dry my hands, tuck the phone under my palm, and tell my reflection the smallest true thing I can manage: “We’ll deal with it.”
The reflection doesn’t argue. It never does.
I kill the bathroom light and ease the door open on a slice, letting the dark breathe back into the apartment. The rain has shifted from needle to thread, stitching the windows with a softer sound. Jason doesn’t move on the bed; his breathing is a steady hush I could time a pulse to. I stand there long enough for my eyes to adjust and for my courage to pretend it’s bigger than it is.
Back in the bedroom, the city paints the walls with watery squares. I slide under the sheet, careful not to jostle. The mattress dips and sighs; he turns toward me in his sleep like I’m a compass point his body knows without looking. My phone rests on the nightstand face down. I should leave it there. I should sleep. I should do a dozen responsible things that taste like cardboard.
I pull the phone into the cave of the sheet and unlock it low, like a teenager. The app is still open, cheerful as ever. I’m about to close it when a notification blooms over the calendar with the quiet insistence of a hand on my shoulder.
5 days late.
The words are small and polite and land like a hammer. A little vibration purls against my palm. My lungs forget what they were doing and then remember all at once, too fast.
Footsteps scuff the hall outside the bedroom—soft, bare, unthreatening. He must have gotten up for water. The floorboard near the dresser gives its familiar complaint. I press the phone to my stomach like proximity can muffle truth and watch the amber wedge of light widen in the doorway as his shadow leans in.
The app offers a link:Order test?Another banner below it, maddeningly calm:Common causes of late cycles include stress and travel.A carousel of pastel dots slides cheerfully as if they are not swallowed by the gravity that just opened in my chest.
I lock the screen so fast my thumb misses the button once. The black glass throws my face back at me—eyes too wide, mouth too flat. I flip the phone and slide it under the pillow like I’m thirteen and hiding a diary I don’t want to write in yet.
“Hey,” Jason’s voice comes from the doorway, low enough not to spook anything. “You awake?”
I school my breath into something that won’t give me away and roll toward him. The city light sketches his shoulders in soft geometry. He’s a glass of water in one hand, a question in the other.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I say, which is true, and doesn’t cover an inch of the truth’s footprint. My throat tightens around everything else trying to line up behind it.
He crosses to the nightstand, sets down the glass, and the condensation ring starts its slow halo. His hand hovers, not touching me yet, asking before he asks. “Everything okay?” It’s the second time tonight he’s offered the question like a blanket instead of a trap.
I feel the app’s notification sitting under my pillow like a live wire, humming its two words into the quiet. I’m not ready to putthem in the air and watch them turn into something we have to hold with both hands. Not with seven a.m. around the corner and a world eager to call us names while we balance on a thread.
“It’s nothing,” I whisper, and even to my own ears it sounds like a lie told gently to keep a bird from bolting.
His silhouette tilts, searching my face. The rain stitches another seam down the glass. The phone hums once more under the pillow—phantom or real, I can’t tell—and the sound runs along my nerves like a struck string.
I hold very still and will the dark to keep my secret for a few more hours.
Chapter 20
