“Mary,” I called.
She came in. Looked at the counter. Looked at the test. Her face went through several expressions stacking on top of each other, too fast for me to read, and then she looked at me.
“Congratulations,” she said softly.
I braced for devastation. For panic, for the floor dropping out the way it did when I read the magazine. I waited for the terror to hit.
It didn’t come.
What came instead was joy. Fierce, sudden, filling my chest so fast it pushed out everything else. There was a baby inside me. My baby. Not his, not ours, mine. I put my hand on my flat stomach and felt something shift behind my ribs, not the bond pain, not the grief, not the hollow ache that had taken up residence there. This was new, warm, ferociously alive. It didn’t care about the magazine or the rejection or the man who said none of it was real. It just existed, growing, already bigger than everything that was trying to crush me.
“Oh God,” I said, and I was laughing and crying at the same time, tears running down my face while my mouth couldn’t stop smiling. “Oh God, Mary.”
She was crying too. She sat on the tub edge beside me, arm around my shoulders. We stayed there laughing and crying while the faucet dripped and the test sat on the counter.
“I’m pregnant,” I said, because saying it made it real.
“You’re pregnant.”
“I’m going to be a mom.” The word felt enormous in my mouth. Mom. My mother was a mom. My mother was a mom. She smelled like lavender, sang off-key while she cooked, died on a highway when I was fifteen. Now I was going to be one. The thought should have terrified me. Instead it made me grip my stomach tighter, protective already, my body making decisions my brain hadn’t caught up to yet.
“You’re going to be the best mom.”
I pressed my hand harder against my stomach. The joy held. Underneath the chaos, underneath everything, it held. I was going to be a mother. Whatever else was broken, this wasn’t.
The decision came fast. I was leaving Atlanta.
“I can’t stay here,” I told Mary that afternoon, sitting on my couch with tea she’d made me, the curtains finally open, sunlight hitting surfaces that had been dark for days. “Everything in this city is him. The office, the streets, the shelter, this house. I can’t heal here.”
“Where will you go?”
“Whitebrook. My grandma.”
Mary nodded. Her eyes were wet but she didn’t argue, didn’t try to talk me out of it, just squeezed my hand. “When?”
“As soon as I can pack.”
It took two days. I started with the bedroom because the living room still smelled like him. Folded clothes into suitcases, stripped the bed, packed the books I wanted to keep in a box I got from the hardware store next to Bonalisa. The rest went into bags for donation. I worked fast because if I slowed down I’d start thinking about why I was packing, and I couldn’t afford to think right now. I could only move.
The hardest part was the porch. I stood there on the last morning with my coffee and looked at the spot where Fin used to lie beside me while I read, the exact plank of wood where his head used to rest, and my throat closed. I’d sat here hundreds of nights, talking to a dog about my life, pouring out my secrets to a man in disguise. The anger should have made it easier to leave. It didn’t. I missed the dog. Hated the man. Loved them both. The contradiction was exhausting.
The goodbye at Bonalisa nearly broke me. I went on the last morning before my flight. Mary and Peter were waiting by the front door, the hand-painted sign above them faded in the early light, the shelter tucked between the laundromat and the hardware store the same way it had been since the first day I walked in two years ago.
The animals first. I went through the kennels one by one, touching noses through the bars, scratching ears, saying goodbye to the ones I’d walked, fed, fostered, loved. Then Buddy. The German Shepherd I’d fostered twice, the one who’d been so traumatized he wouldn’t let anyone near him when he first came in. He pressed his head against my chest when I knelt beside him and I held him and cried into his fur.
“I’ll miss you,” I whispered. “Be good. Let someone adopt you. Let someone love you.”
Peter hugged me at the door. Tight, silent, his chin on top of my head because he was so much taller than me. Then Mary grabbed me so hard I couldn’t breathe, her arms locked around my shoulders, her face pressed against my neck.
“You call me. Every day. I mean it.”
“Every day.”
“And you eat something other than noodles.”
“I make no promises.”
She laughed, then cried, then laughed again. I memorized her face because I didn’t know when I’d see it next.
