“Maybe it's time.” She squeezed my fingers. “Whatever's going on, you don't have to figure it out alone. But you do have to take care of yourself. This place needs you. I need you.” A small smile. “Who else is going to burn the cinnamon rolls if you're not here?”
That made me chuckle.
“I will,” I said.
Elena nodded, but her eyes said she wasn't going to let this go. “I'm here. Whatever you need. Even if it's just someone to hold your hair back.” She squeezed my hand once more, then stood. “Now. Let me make you some toast. Plain. No butter. See if we can get something to stay down.”
I didn't argue. I just sat there, letting someone take care of me for the first time in weeks, and tried not to cry.
My period was three weeks late. I'd noticed a few days ago, counted backward on the calendar, and felt the floor drop out from under me. The last time Marcus and I had been together. Before everything fractured.
The timeline aligned with cruel precision.
I drove to the pharmacy in Millbrook, forty minutes away. Far enough that no one would know me. Enough distance that Iwouldn’t run into anyone from town, wouldn’t have to explain why I was buying what I was buying.
The store was bright and sterile, fluorescent lights humming overhead. I walked past the cold medicine, past the bandages, past the vitamins, until I found the aisle I was looking for. Pregnancy tests lined the shelf in neat rows. Different brands, different prices, different promises of accuracy.
I grabbed two. Different brands, as if that would change anything.
The teenager at the register didn't look twice at me. Just scanned the boxes, told me the total, and handed me my change. I paid in cash, like I couldn’t leave a trace. Maybe I was. Maybe I was about to uncover something that would change everything.
The drive home took forever.
My hands shook on the steering wheel. The tests sat on the passenger seat in a brown paper bag, accusing. I kept glancing at them, as if they might disappear, as if this might all turn out to be a dream I could wake up from.
I thought about my mother. Pregnant at twenty-two with a man who promised her the world and delivered nothing but heartbreak. She'd been so young, so hopeful, so sure that love would be enough. I remembered the photos Gran kept in the hallway—Mom glowing, hand on her belly, Dad's arm around her shoulders. They looked happy. They looked like people who had figured it out.
And then Dad left. Mom spent the following years trying to hold herself together with nothing but pride and denial. Trying to be both parents at once. Failing, slowly, until Gran had to step in and pick up the pieces.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter.
Gran's voice echoed in my head, the way it always did when I needed her most.History doesn't have to repeat itself, girl. You get to write your own story.
But I didn't feel like the author right now.
I felt like a character someone else was writing, trapped in a plot that didn’t feel like mine. Every choice I'd made, every path I'd taken, and somehow I'd ended up here anyway. Alone. Scared. Driving home with two pregnancy tests and a future I couldn't see.
The B&B appeared around the final curve, white and solid against the afternoon sky. Home. The only place that had never let me down.
I parked in my usual spot and sat there for a long moment, the engine ticking softly as it cooled. The bag rested in my lap, light as paper and somehow impossibly heavy, my fingers curled tight around it like if I loosened my grip, everything inside me might come apart too.
Whatever those tests said, everything was about to change. I could feel it in my chest, in the way my pulse wouldn’t settle, in the strange pressure behind my eyes. This was a line I couldn’t uncross. The clean divide of before and after, my life split down the middle by two pink lines I hadn’t even seen yet.
I thought about the woman I’d been this morning. The one who believed she was just tired. Just grieving. Just trying to get through another day.
I took a breath. It caught halfway in, sharp and shallow. I forced another, slower this time, until my hands stopped shaking quite so badly.
I didn’t feel ready. I didn’t think I ever would.
Still, I opened the door.
And then I went inside.
I locked the bathroom door even though no one else was home. Force of habit. Or maybe I just needed the illusion of control, one small thing I could decide for myself.
The first test came out of the box in pieces. Wrapper, instruction sheet, and the white plastic stick. I read the instructions twice. One line means not pregnant. Two lines means pregnant. Wait three minutes for results.
I took the test. Set it face-down on the edge of the sink. Couldn't watch it. Couldn't stand there staring while the chemicals did whatever chemicals do, while my whole future rearranged itself on a plastic stick.
