“It’s okay, Char, if you don’t feel like playing anymore.”
The strange thing is that I do feel something. Grief, maybe. Even though there’s no memory attached to it. No face. No voice. Just the knowledge that someone else was supposed to be here and never got the chance.
I take a slow breath and look back at the board.
“I’m okay,” I say softly.
Then I lift my eyes to his.
“Your move.”
We keep playing, and for a while it helps. The structure of it. The simplicity. The board between us is contained and predictable in a way nothing else ever really is.
Pieces shift. Positions change. It’s familiar enough that I can follow it without thinking too deeply.
I let the game fill my head for a little while. And for a time, it works. Then the thought slips back in anyway.
My mother was pregnant.
The image rises again before I can stop it—the small curved shape suspended in gray shadow, something alive and forming that never got the chance to become anything more. Another life that ended before it began.
And beneath that thought, another one starts quietly turning over in my mind.
Five years.
We’ve been careful. Consistent. As precise as we can be with what we have—counting days, tracking cycles, avoiding the windows we think matter. Adjusting when we need to. Paying attention.
And it’s worked.
No missed cycles. No uncertainty. Nothing to suggest we got it wrong.
I’ve always taken that at face value—proof we were being careful enough. But sitting here now, with the ultrasound photo still resting beside the chessboard, something starts shifting uneasily in my mind.
What if it isn’t working?
What if it never has?
I move a piece without really thinking, and Dane takes it immediately.
I glance up. “Can I say something not about chess?”
His attention shifts fully to me. “Always.”
I hesitate for a second, trying to figure out how to explain the thought now that it’s fully formed.
“We’ve been having sex without birth control for over five years,” I say quietly. “We track my fertile days as carefully as we can, but it’s still mostly guesswork.”
My fingers twist together in my lap.
“And in all that time…” I look down at my hands. “We’ve never had a pregnancy scare. Not once.”
He doesn’t answer right away. He just lets the thought sit between us, the way he always does when he’s actually thinking something through instead of reacting to it.
“That could just mean the tracking’s working.”
“It could.” I hold his gaze. “Or it could mean something else.”
His expression shifts. “Like what?”
