I SLID OUT OF BED ANDpulled on my shirt, inside out, naturally. A fitting reflection of my life choices. His bathroom was small: shower, sink, a cabinet with a mirror that didn’t close all the way. I ran water over a washcloth and wiped honey from my collarbone, my ribs, the crease of my elbow where it had migrated through unknown forces.
I reached for the cabinet to grab a towel.
The door swung wider than I intended.
Aspirin. Band-Aids. Dental floss. And behind the aspirin, pushed to the back but not concealed, a bottle of prenatal vitamins.
I froze midair.
Prenatal vitamins. Not a generic multivitamin, not calcium, not the fish oil supplements a health-conscious man might keep. Prenatals. The seal was broken. No dust on the cap.
I picked it up. My fingers trembled. I set it back exactly where it was.
The decaf. He’d switched the coffee days ago and told me he was trying a new roast. The ginger tea that had appeared beside my peppermint the same week my nausea turned relentless. The lighter meals. The water he set beside me without being asked.
I walked out of the bathroom. Looked up.
The loft.
I’d never been up there. It had been storage every time I’d passed through this cabin: spare frames, old equipment, boxes he’d never sorted. The ladder leaned against the wall.
I climbed it.
The loft was empty. Swept clean. The pine floor had been sanded smooth. I could see the marks where he’d worked it by hand, section by section, the rough grain rubbed to silk. The boxes were gone. The broken equipment was gone. On the far wall, where solid pine met the roofline, someone had drawn pencil lines in a neat rectangle. Measurements for a window.
My knees buckled. I caught the railing.
He’d been building a nursery.
All of it collapsed into one picture: the decaf, the vitamins, the ginger tea, the nausea-friendly meals, the floor sanded to splinter-free smoothness, the pencil marks for a window that didn’t exist yet. A room he’d cleared without being asked, for a baby he hadn’t been told about.
I want to put a baby in you. His hand on my stomach. The words cracking in half.
He knew.
I came down the ladder too fast, missed the bottom rung, and stumbled. He was in the bedroom pulling on his jeans. He looked up.
“Atlas.”
He went still.
“I need to tell you something and I need you to not say a word until I’m finished because if you interrupt me I will lose my nerve and I have been losing my nerve for ten days and I cannot do it again.”
He straightened. Stood there. Shirtless, steady, the late sun behind him. He waited.
“I’m pregnant.” It came out in a flood, no punctuation, no pauses, no plan. “I’ve been pregnant since before I drove to Montana and you’re the father. Not because of the kitchen counter, before that. Seven weeks ago. A fertility clinic in Portland. You were Donor 3847. I chose you because of your essay about paying attention to what was already growing, and I got pregnant, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about the person behind the profile, and I drove nine hours and I fell on your bees, and I lied about the landscaping and the client and every single reason I’ve given for being here. The plants are real. The garden is real. What I feel for you is so real it’s destroying me. And I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and if you never want to —”
“Flora.”
“I said not a word —”
“I know.”
The words jammed. My lungs emptied.
“What?”
He was leaning against the doorframe. No anger. No shock. His expression was quiet, open, and so steady my ribs ached. He looked at me as he’d looked at the first shooting star of the spring — recognition, patience, a man seeing what he’d expected to find.
