“It’s more than that,” I insist. “We spend all day in that trailer together. I can hear him through the partition, for God’s sake. And we keep bumping into each other in the apartment building. It’s getting weird.” I lower my voice, leaning in. “The other night, I was coming out of the laundry room with my basket, and he was just coming in, and we literally crashed into each other. My clean underwear wenteverywhere. There was a pair of my laciest thongs on his head, Alexis. On his actual head. It was mortifying.”
Hannah’s shoulders hunch and she lowers her head, trying to contain her laughter from waking the baby. “Okay, that’s hilarious. But also, so what? It’s a funny story. As long as you’re both on the same page, you can spend as much time together as you want. And you so obviously like him.”
“It’s not about liking him,” I mutter, even though my cheeks are hot. “It’s about… proximity. And professionalism.”
“He wasn’t asking you to move in and start picking out china patterns,” Alexis says gently. “He was asking you to have a single drink to celebrate the first day of school. What is so wrong with that? It feels like you’re self-sabotaging.”
Her words hit a little too close to home, and the real reason, the one I’ve been holding tight in my chest, starts to feel heavy.The air in the room suddenly feels thick, charged with their unanswered questions. My hands still.
“I haven’t told him about the lupus,” I say, the words barely a whisper.
The clicking of their needles stops. The silence in the room is absolute, broken only by the baby’s soft, sleepy sigh.
“Okay,” Alexis says slowly, her voice soft. “Why would you need to tell him that before having a single beer?”
“Because if I spend any more time with him, it’s going to come up,” I say, frustration making my voice shake. “A flare-up will happen, or I’ll have a doctor’s appointment I can’t get out of, or he’ll just… see it. And I can’t risk him telling people.”
“Why would he tell people?” Hannah asks, her brow furrowed in confusion. “He seems like a decent guy.”
“He is, I think. But he and Trevor have this… rapport. It’s weird. I‘ve seen them talking by the office a few times this week, laughing like old buddies. I don’t get it. But what if I tell Zachary, and he lets it slip to Trevor? Trevor would use it against me. He’d say I’m not up to the job, that my health is a liability. He’d find a way to manage me out.”
“He can’t do that,” Alexis says fiercely. “If he even tried, you could go straight to HR. That’s discrimination.”
“I don’t want to go to HR!” I snap, the force of my own voice surprising me. “I don’t want a fuss. I don’t want to be ‘the sick teacher.’ I don’t want the stress and the meetings and the whispers in the staff room. It’s just… it’s easier to keep it a secret. It’s safer.”
I don’t realize my eyes have filled with tears until the fluorescent lights of the clinic blur into a watery smear. A fat, hot tear escapes and rolls down my cheek. Hannah is suddenly beside me, pushing a tissue into my hand. I’m about to mumble a thank you when familiar male laughter rings out from behind us.
My head jerks up, my heart hammering against my ribs. It’s Michael, Hannah’s boyfriend, his firefighter uniform still smelling faintly of smoke. And with him are a few of the other guys from the station, including Dave, the head of the science department. Zachary’s brownie-baking teammate.
Panic, cold and sharp, seizes me.Did he hear me? Did he hear the word lupus?My entire body goes rigid. I watch him, terrified, as he ambles over to the refreshments table and pours himself a cup of coffee. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t seem to have registered a single word of our conversation.
He pulls up a chair at our table, setting down a canvas bag. “Evening, ladies,” he says, his voice the same jovial boom it is in the school hallways. He pulls a half-finished scarf from his bag, the pattern an intricate series of interlocking-colored squares. “Mind if I join? My intarsia is giving me fits.”
“Sure. We’re happy to share the table.” Alexis pauses to resettle Sterling, who’s starting to wake up and wiggle around.
“Alexis, how’s Noah? Michael said he had an incident.” Dave asks as his needles start the familiar clicking rhythm.
“He’s okay. A little embarrassed overall, but good. Just grumbles about not being able to use both hands for baking. Though he’s not complaining at all about not being able to change diapers.” She rolls her eyes. “He’ll be right as rain in no time.”
Dave barks out a laugh. “Glad he’s got his priorities straight.”
The tension drains out of me in a rush, leaving me feeling weak and shaky. He didn’t hear. I’m safe. Relieved at the distraction, I pick my own project back up, my fingers finding the familiar rhythm of the yarn and needles. The conversation shifts to knitting techniques and town gossip. For now, I can banish the thoughts of lupus, of Trevor, of Zachary and his kind eyes and complicated presence in my life. For now, I can just knit.
The headlights cut a lonely path through the island’s darkness as I drive home from the clinic. My shoulders are tight, my hands aching from hours of knitting, but it’s a good kind of tired. The easy camaraderie of the knit-a-thon, and the chance to finally voice my fears about Zachary, has left me feeling settled. The words, once spoken, seem to have lost some of their terrible power, diffused into the warm, yarn-scented air of the community room. My friends’ support was a quiet balm. They didn't push or offer easy answers; they just listened. And for the first time in a long while, the secret I'm keeping from Zachary, and Trevor, and, really, all of my coworkers, doesn’t feel like a lead weight in my gut. It just feels... manageable.
My mind drifts to him, as it so often does these days. The mortifying laundry room incident. His offer of a beer. His easy smile. I feel a pang of regret for turning him down, for using my ferret as a shield. Maybe Alexis was right. Maybe it was just a drink. But the fear is a well-worn groove in my brain, a path my thoughts follow automatically. The fear of him finding out, of him seeing me as fragile, of the secret getting back to Trevor. It’s exhausting.
I’m almost home when my phone buzzes in the cup holder, the screen lighting up with a picture of my mother, a professional headshot where she’s smiling serenely. The calm I’d been carefully cultivating evaporates like mist in the sun. I take a breath, brace myself, and connect the call to my car’s Bluetooth, my knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Maya, darling! How are you?” Her voice is syrupy sweet, a tone that always sets my teeth on edge. It’s the voice she uses before she asks for something.
“I’m fine, Mom. Just driving home.”
“Good, good. I’m glad I caught you. I was just thinking about you,” she says. I wait for the other shoe to drop. It doesn’t take long. “Listen, darling, I’ve been waiting for your text. The journalist from the magazine is getting antsy. She has a deadline, you know. You’re not respecting her time.”
The whiplash is instantaneous. I want to scream that she’s not respectingmytime. That I’m a teacher navigating the first chaotic week of school, that my days are a frantic blur of lesson plans, scraped knees, untied shoes, and constant emotional support for little humans. My evenings are spent trying to piece myself back together to get up and do it again the next day, not perform my illness for a stranger with a notepad. Instead, I bottle the anger, letting it curdle in my stomach. “I’m sorry, Mom. It’s been a really hectic week. The first week of school is always insane.”
