“Tabby, don’t!” he begged. “Please stop hurting yourself.”
“Fuck you. I’ll hurt myself if I want to! Because you know what, Toby? When we hooked up, I was already thinking,‘Holy shit, this is the start of something amazing!’but no. You left. You bailed and forgot me like everybody does when I’m not doing exactly what they want. My sisters. Noah. I haven’t seen my dad in two years, and I didn’t even recognise my own mother when I was tattooing her. Everyone always leaves, and I haveno one.”
Toby fell to his knees, his head bent like he was praying. “I thought I was?—”
“Supposed to go become some thriller novel version of a man,” Tabby sobbed. “Well, congrats, because it was probably the only reason I fucked you again. Because you were so different from the guy I used to like, I didn’t have to think about how you screwed me over. Youweredifferent. It was night and day, and it wasgood!”
Toby raised his head to look at her, his eyes shining. “I was me. I’malwaysme.”
“Good for you,” Tabby croaked. “Because I’m done. I never want to see you again.”
She yanked up the straps of her dress and walked to her clutch on legs that felt mushy as cooked rice. Toby reached out to her as she marched toward the door.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Trust me. We can go upstairs, we can do anything you want…”
Tabby swerved his fingers and kept right on walking. “Never again. Not you. Not anyone. Never. Again.”
Then she left. Just like Deborah did. Just like everyone did.
* * *
Tabby hadto pull over on the way home, puking onto the side of the road like the girl inThe Exorcist. Passing cars honked at the drunk bitch power-spewing onto the bitumen on a Thursday night.
“Thanks,” she croaked, waving after them. “I’m not shitfaced, though. Don’t call the fucking cops.”
She cleaned the road as best she could with a bottle of water, and returned to the car feeling utterly disgusting. She drove for a minute or so when a terrible, horrible,impossiblethought entered her mind. Pulling over a second time, she opened her phone and checked apps, dates, and times, her horror mounting until she could hardly breathe.
It couldn’t be possible. Not in a million years.
“Proof,” she told herself. “I need proof.”
Hands shaking, she drove to the nearest open supermarket and bought a bulk pack of tests, grateful the self-checkout kept her from having to look anyone in the eyes.
On the way back to Nix’s car, she passed a family Italian restaurant. It was a cosy little place full of boring people doing tedious things, eating marinara like they had all the time in the world.
Fuck them, she thought viciously.Fuck everything.
She pulled up a block from the studio and climbed the tree to her bedroom like Toby had done. She crept across the floorboards to the bathroom so they wouldn’t creak. No one appeared to be home and if they were, they weren’t awake. She pulled the tests from the plastic bag and opened all ten at once. One would have sufficed, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She pissed over all of them, getting urine everywhere, and laid them out on the floor. Then she sat on the closed lid of the toilet and waited.
The box said the result would take at least two minutes, but that was a lie. Within seconds, the answer was clear: double red lines across all ten blue-coloured plastic strips.
Tabby pressed her wrist into her mouth and bit down. She kept biting, digging her teeth into skin and bone, waiting for something that wouldn’t happen.
Then the door swung open, and Nicole stood in the doorway in her dressing gown.
Tabby screamed, and scooped up the pissy pregnancy tests as fast as she could. She threw them in the toilet, her hand rushing to hit ‘flush,’ but it was already too late. She’d missed a test. A test that Nicole bent to pick up. Her sister examined the strip, her face contracting like a caterpillar. The test said what all the others said; pregnant, expecting a baby, knocked the fuck up.
And Nicole opened her mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed.
15
“Dahling, this is tragic.”
Maisy held up the plate he’d painted for his mother in grade three. It showed her boggle-eyed and long-haired, surrounded by what were probably meant to be dogs but looked more like demons. Toby felt a pang for the boy who’d wanted to make his mother smile… and the man who’d held onto the keepsake in the hope his mum would want to hold onto it.
“Chuck it,” he said, holding out the plastic trash bag. “I don’t wanna take that to Savers.”
“Oh, you never know, dahling, someone might be performing a satanic rite and think this is just theverything.” Maisy put the plate into the second-hand store box and picked up a trophy he’d won in some primary school athletics carnival. “They give these for fourth place?”
