I open my mouth to answer.
And then I stop.
It’s not a dramatic moment. There’s no music, no sharp intake of breath, no sudden clarity arriving from somewhere cinematic. It’s just me sitting on the couch on a Friday night looking at the television while Mara adjusts her hot water bottle, and the thought arrives the way genuinely terrible thoughts arrive, quietly and without warning, and once it is there, I cannot make it not be there.
I do the math.
The masquerade was six weeks ago.
I do the math again.
Six weeks ago.
I do it a third time.
The answer does not change.
“Elena.” Mara is looking at me. “You’ve gone completely white.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine. You look like someone just told you something terrible.”
“I’m just tired.” I stand up. “I’m going to bed.”
She watches me cross the room. She knows I’m not going to say anything else tonight and that pressing me will not change that. She lets me go.
“Okay,” she says. “Goodnight.”
I close my bedroom door, sit on the edge of my bed, and look at the wall.
I buy the test on my lunch break on Saturday. I don’t let myself think about it too carefully on the walk to the pharmacy because thinking about it carefully will make my legs stop working, and I can’t afford for my legs to stop working on a public street in broad daylight.
I buy two, because one feels like optimism I can’t afford, and I walk to the coffee shop three blocks from the office out of some instinct I can’t explain, the way you return to a place that feels known when everything else feels the opposite.
The bathroom is single occupancy. I lock the door.
I follow the instructions with focused concentration, then set the test on the edge of the sink, look at my own face in the mirror, and wait.
Two minutes.
I do not look at the test for the first minute.
I look at my own reflection, and I think about the filing I finished last night and the calendar entry that says Roman lands Monday morning. Even Carla’s voice on the phone saying he is not going to wait forever, and I think about my father in his chair by the window, looking more tired every time I visit.
I think about a masquerade ball six weeks ago, an emerald dress, an ivory mask, and a man who held me like I was something worth taking time over.
I look at the test.
There are two pink lines.
I sit on the closed lid of the toilet, place the test on the floor in front of me, look at it, and don’t move for a long time.
The coffee shop makes noise on the other side of the door. Someone knocks once, lightly, and then goes away. A chair scrapes across the floor. The espresso machine runs through its cycle. The world continues with complete indifference to the two pink lines on the floor of this bathroom, and I sit with my hands pressed flat on my thighs and I breathe, in and out, until the first wave of something passes and the second wave comes and passes too and what is left underneath both of them is just the plain, cold arithmetic of my situation.
I am pregnant.
Roman Petrov is the father.
