“Anne!”
I turned to see Daanis—my playmate, my partner in crime, my very best friend since kindergarten—coming toward me with her arms outstretched and sagged in relief. With Daanis, I could be myself. When she hugged me, we fit together the way we always had.
Except…her hard, round little belly pressed against me.
“You’re pregnant again!” I exclaimed and then bit my tongue. Not something you blurted to a woman with a bump, not even your best friend.
But she nodded, beaming.
“When? How?” I demanded.
“The baby’s due in August.” Her dark eyes sparkled with laughter. “Your boyfriend is the doctor. He can explain it to you.”
I hugged her again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You weren’t here.”
My heart hiccupped. We weren’t as close as we had been. When her daughter, Rose, was born two years ago, I’d been barred from visiting because of the pandemic. But I’d stood outside her window with a bouquet of pink balloons. And when I went back to Chicago, we’d FaceTimed every day. Well, almost every day. Daanis was busy with her baby, and I was worrying about Chris and trying desperately to connect with my students on Zoom.
“I came for Christmas,” I reminded her. The last time I’d seen Dad. I swallowed the lump in my throat.
Chris had spent the holidays with his parents.
“It’s not that you’re not welcome,” Chris had said when he revealed his plans. “It’s just…”
That his mother did not like me.
“We’re not engaged,” I’d said, finishing his sentence to mask my hurt. Not even officially living together.
Couldn’t blame that on his mother, either. It was the pandemic’s fault.
Although sometimes I wondered if Chrislikedliving apart. If he needed an occasional respite from my socks on the floor, my dishes in the sink, the scribbled-on notes and receipts I left scattered around. Which…You know what? It was fine. Sometimes it was a relief for me, too, not to jump up to clean every little thing the second I was done.
But I spent the nights he wasn’t at the hospital in his Lincoln Park apartment. He kept a toothbrush and boxers at my place. Moving in together was only a matter of time. Of timing.
Chris had had the grace to look embarrassed. “We’ve always been just family for the holidays. After the last two years, I owe my mother that much.”
“I understand,” I’d assured him with superhuman poise.
“We’ll be together New Year’s.”
“New Year’s Eve,” I clarified.
“Just the two of us.” He kissed me softly, rewarding me for not making a fuss. “I can’t wait.”
And so I’d rushed through the visit with my parents, skipping out on Mom when she went into the shop to fill online orders for fudge, begging off Dad’s invitation to go snowshoeing to catch an earlier flight back to Chicago. I’d stopped by Daanis’s house to drop off presents. But I hadn’t truly made time for her. I hadn’t made time for any of them.
Regret burned my eyeballs.
“I barely knew myself at Christmastime,” Daanis was saying.
That she was pregnant, she meant.
I nodded, my throat unexpectedly thick. We used to share everything, our hopes and dreams, our fears and feelings, what mean thing Sabrina had said in the lunchroom, what annoying thing Joe had done that day. I knew about her first kiss (Zack, in seventh grade). I called her when I lost my V-card (to a guy in my Studies in Fiction class, who spent the rest of the quarter ducking his head every time he passed my desk). Life on the island sometimes seemed a world away. But we still texted. She would have told me if her period was even a day late.
Or so I’d thought.
“I love your hair color,” she said. “Like high school!”
