The call ends. I stare at the phone until my reflection warps in the black screen. No dots. No reply. No clock that says later is now. I pocket it and head for the showers, steam rising like ghosts.
By late afternoon, the day has the texture of sandpaper. I go home because there’s nowhere else to be that won’t turn into aheadline. The apartment smells faintly of rain and her shampoo. I stand in the kitchen, trying to care about eggs or nothing. Water wins. The glass sweats against my palm.
Her hair tie lies on the counter—a thin black circle that could hold a planet in place. Beside it, her tablet rests facedown, forgotten. I don’t touch it. I also don’t walk away. The rain needles the windows. A radiator ticks. My phone stays silent.
The tablet wakes with a soft glow. A banner slides across the lock screen before I can look away:
Appointment Confirmed — Midtown Women’s Clinic
Today, 4:10 PM · New patient intake
The words knock the air sideways. I go still enough that the hum of the fridge sounds like a siren. I don’t swipe, don’t breathe. I read them again. 4:10. Midtown. Thirty-eight minutes from now.
She didn’t tell me. She didn’t ask. Of course she didn’t. She saidlater,and the city ate the clock.
The rational voice in my head tries to file options—routine visit, standard check-in, nothing dramatic. The other voice counts seconds like heartbeats. Each one louder than the last.
The banner fades. The room exhales. I stare at the dark screen, at my own reflection hovering there, waiting for something I can’t name. My phone buzzes—a phantom or real, I don’t know—and I grab it, stupid with hope. Nothing from her. Just a calendar ping:Skate review moved to 6:30.I swipe it away like an insult.
I type,Do you want me there?Delete.Here if you need a ride.Delete.Tell me what you need.Delete. The cursor blinks until my eyes burn. Backspace. Nothing.
The tablet wakes again, efficient and indifferent:Reminder: Leave now to arrive on time.
A pressure change rolls through the apartment—the kind that happens before a storm. I set my phone on the counter so I don’t crush it, brace both hands on the sink, and let the cold metal bite. She scheduled it. She’s going. Alone.
Rain threads down the glass. The fridge hums steady. I count the seconds to 4:10 and none of them add up to anything I can carry.
Chapter 21
Life Changes
Riley
The bathroom tilesare cold enough to make my kneecaps ring. I tug the hem of Jason’s T-shirt lower like fabric can negotiate with ceramic. The fan hums its useless white noise above me—steady, falsely kind. On the edge of the tub, the stick I told myself I didn’t need blooms its verdict in slow motion.
One line arrives like a breath I didn’t take. The second follows—faint, then brighter—bleeding into existence as if it remembers me. Two pink lines. Simple, ruthless geometry.
My pulse drums in my throat. I read the insert again even though the icon is thumbnail-small and my brain knows what it means. Two lines: pregnant. The word is small on the page and enormous in my chest. The room tilts six degrees, then settles around a different word entirely.
Baby.
I don’t say it out loud. Sound would make it real, and real would blow a hole through the carefully laminated plans that got me this far. I press my palms to my eyes until stars spark; when they fade, the lines don’t.
I sit back on my heels because I don’t trust standing. The bathmat is the cheap drugstore kind—thin, pilled, somehow the only soft thing in the world. The test lies on the tub edge like a polite weapon. I think about the training room—protocols, checklists, all the ways I control risk. None of those sheets have a bullet point for this.
Nausea tightens low and mean. I breathe the way I tell players to breathe through sting: in for four, out for six—again, again—until my throat unlocks. The fan chews the air and fails to swallow the truth.
I pick up the test because hiding it in the trash feels like lying to the future. The plastic is still warm. In the tiny window, my reflection is half an eye and a smudge of hair; I look like a stranger peering through a keyhole.
Noise from the apartment moves toward me—pipes clack, the radiator complains, the city pours itself down the street. I shouldn’t be here. I should be at the facility, seven a.m. with compliance, telling neat versions of messy things. Anywhere but this floor holding a life raft I didn’t know I’d inflated.
Baby.The word doesn’t explode me. It rearranges me. It stacks everything I knew into a different architecture and asks me to walk through the door anyway.
I set the test gently on a folded towel and reach for my phone with hands that don’t feel entirely mine. The lock screen is a cascade of obligations—calendar blocks, a reminder to send Ducks a hamstring update—the tidy life I’ve built out of chaos. I look past all of it to the clock.7:03.Later is now and also a lifetime away.
I rinse my mouth because the taste of metal won’t leave. Water beads on my knuckles. Jason kissed those knuckles last night like they were a story he wanted to read to the end. Heat unfurls under my ribs. Cold curls around it.
Two lines. Two lives, maybe. One decision at a time.
