When I finally get up to go, I check my phone. There’s a message from Liam:
Miss you. Come home?
I tuck the phone away, let the question hang in the space between heartbeats.
I don’t know where “home” is, not yet.
But for now, I walk out into the warm blue dusk, letting the possibility of it pull me forward.
The house smellslike garlic and panic. I’m standing at the butcher block, chopping onions that don’t make me cry, but my eyes are still wet anyway. The knife thunks against the wood in staccato, a nervous, arrhythmic beat that matches the jitter under my skin. The countertop is littered with the detritus of dinner prep: zucchini coins, tomato guts, two cloves of garlic mashed into a resinous paste. I’ve set the table with his favorite placemats—mid-century modern, abstract lines in navy and orange—and the cloth napkins I always iron, even though neither of us cares.
It’s not even a big deal. People get pregnant. People have awkward conversations with their boyfriends about “the future.” But standing in Liam’s kitchen, three months into my master’s program, I feel like I’m about to detonate an IED under the foundation of our whole life.
The front door opens with the usual shudder and bang. I hear him in the foyer, setting down his briefcase and kicking off his boots. He does a little cough—clearing his throat, telegraphinghis approach. It’s a tic I’ve come to recognize as affection, like he wants to make sure I have enough warning to put on my game face.
Liam comes into the kitchen, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, the day’s stress still knitted between his eyebrows. He sniffs the air and grins. “That smells incredible, sweetheart.”
“Thanks.” I scrape onions into the pan and watch them hiss.
He walks up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist, hands splaying across my belly, and I almost lose it right there. I freeze, my heart bungee-jumping into my throat.
He kisses the back of my neck. “Bad day?” he says.
I shake my head. “Just tired.”
He pulls away, but lingers at the island, picking at a chunk of bread. I watch him out of the corner of my eye as he tears it into perfect halves, then eighths, then sixteenths, eating each fragment with forensic precision. We’ve become a picture of domestic bliss: the handsome professor and the pretty grad student, cohabitating in a house lined with too many books and an alarming number of throw pillows. It’s too good to last, and I can’t stop myself from poking myself every time I look at him.
We sit down to dinner. The food is fine. I try to taste it, but everything lands like cardboard. I keep waiting for the right moment to say it, but there’s never a right moment. I ask about his class—he complains about a student who plagiarized an essay by copying directly from the Norton Anthology, not even bothering to change the footnotes. He asks about my thesis and I lie, say it’s going great, that the committee loves my topic.
We’re both pretending. I wonder if he can tell.
It’s only when we’re cleaning up—me scraping plates, him filling the dishwasher—that I finally break.
“I need to talk to you,” I say, and my voice is too flat, too formal.
He turns, drying his hands on a towel, suddenly very still.
I look everywhere but at him. “I’m pregnant,” I say, and the words are so much smaller than I thought they’d be. They barely fill the space between us.
He blinks. For a second, I think he didn’t hear me, or didn’t understand. Then his jaw works, a slow, almost painful flex. He opens his mouth, then closes it again.
“How—” he starts, but the word stalls out. Then: “Are you sure?”
I nod. “Doctor confirmed. Six weeks, maybe a little more.”
He drops the towel on the counter. “Is it—?” He stops, realizes how that sounds, and shakes his head. “Sorry. Of course it’s mine. I just—holy shit.”
He sits at the table, rubs his face with both hands. When he looks up, his eyes are glassy, a color I’ve never seen before. “Simone, do you want this?”
The question detonates, but I answer from the heart.
“I think so,” I say, and I hate how weak it sounds. “But I’m scared.”
He exhales, all the air in his lungs leaving at once. “Me too,” he says, but there’s a lopsided smile tugging at his mouth. He stands, crosses to me, and wraps his arms around me, crushing me to his chest. I can hear his heartbeat, a frantic, desperate rhythm.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says into my hair.
We stand there for a long time. I don’t cry, not really, but I feel the relief sluice through me like a fever breaking.
