When I return to the bedroom, Maya has drawn her knees against her chest beneath the sheet. She is trying to look angry, but her eyes give her away. She is waiting for rejection. For control. For some version of me to turn this into another decision made over her head.
I sit next to her.
She flinches when I reach for her hand.
Only slightly.
Enough.
I stop.
“Maya,” I say again. I look at the test in my palm, then at her. “This is good.”
She blinks.
“What?”
“Good.”
Her look goes completely blank.
I have seen Maya furious. I have seen her terrified, bleeding, grieving, defiant. I have never seen her look so utterly unprepared for an answer.
“That is all you have to say?”
“It is the first thing I have to say.”
“Good?”
“Yes.”
She lets out a sharp breath that might be a laugh if it were not so close to panic. “You cannot just say good.”
“I just did.”
“That is not reassuring.”
I put the test on the nightstand and turn fully toward her.
“I am trying to tell you that I am not afraid of this. In fact, I’m happy.”
The room goes quiet.
Maya looks down at her hands.
“I am,” she says. “Afraid, that is.”
The honesty in it nearly undoes me.
“Of what?”
She laughs once, quietly. “Everything.”
I wait.
She does not want to speak at first. I can see it in the way her shoulders pull inward, in the way she keeps worrying the edge of the sheet between her fingers.
Then she says, “I am afraid of becoming Alice.”
