“Of course. But, hey, Ellie?”
I had the feeling that if I opened my mouth, I might vomit, so I just hummed my response and hoped she heard me. “Mm?”
“Before we talk about anything else, I just want you to know that I won’t mutter a word to anyone about this. I won’t tell Blake. Or any other London. Even if I, you know, never hear anything about this again.”
My stomach unclenched ever so slightly at her promises, and I opened my eyes.
“I really appreciate that, Delaney.” I attempted to take a deep breath, but it felt like it only filled one side ofmy lungs, which only made me more anxious. Because I’d felt that sensation before, and I had to remind myself that this wasn’t that.This wasn’t that.“I’m just…still figuring some things out.”
“Of course.” Her voice forcibly brightened. “So, PEQs?”
I finally closed my laptop around ten at night after spending a few hours playing with some ideas for Delaney’s interface. I would have kept working on it, but my stomach had started screaming at me, and not in the same way it had been this morning.
I needed to eat.
I hadn’t been good about that lately. There were too many nerves and strange feelings that were making it hard to find an appetite. Though maybe there was another reason for that, too.
I made a bowl of ramen before dropping onto my couch and turning onThe Fellowship of the Ring—the extended edition, of course—hoping that Howard Shore and the plucky string sounds of “Concerning Hobbits”could lull me into a reality where I lived in the Shire with curly-haired, barefoot neighbors instead of in an apartment building full of tech bros.
A reality where the world was simpler.
Yes, fine, maybe Frodo wouldn’t appreciate me saying that, considering everything he went through to drop that damn ring into the fires of Mount Doom, andmaybehe would go as far as to say that I was being a littleinsensitive—I mean, he did almost become spider food—but nevertheless, his mission wasclear. There was good, and there was evil, and one had to triumph over the other.
I would love some clarity right now.
I needed someone to tell me what to do, even though Iknewwhat the first step was. I knew what I needed to do before anything else. Before I could puzzle out the rest.
The problem was…the thought of actually doing it had me frozen to the couch.
When I reached the break in the two discs of the extended edition ofThe Fellowship—because yes, I did find it extra comforting to watchLOTRon DVD—I forced myself to the bathroom to rip the metaphorical Band-Aid off, my stomach churning with every step.
After many deep breaths, I peed on three separate brands of pregnancy tests, and then I barely even blinked when I found all three to be…positive.
Positive.
Positive.
Positive.
I was pregnant.
I stood in the bathroom, a little numb and a lot terrified. My vision blurred, my current reality fraying at the edges.
No wonder I hadn’t been able to shake Sully after leaving Boston. A part of him had stayed with me. A part of him wasalwaysgoing to be with me, but not in the way I’d grown used to in the last five years. No—in a very real, tangible way. In a human, living way.
Oh my God.
My breaths came to the surface in short staccatos.
I’d spent so many years being haunted by these plus signs. By even theideaof them. My health history had ingrained fears in me that had been impossible to shake. For months and months, Itriedto shake them but couldn’t, and it had ruined so goddamn much in my life.
But tonight, even with everything that was on the line and all the reasons I should be consideringeveryoption I had at my disposal, I…smiled.
I wassmiling.
With reality staring me in the face, no longer a swirl of possibilities in my brain but concrete with evidence in the form of a stick I’d just peed on…I realized that maybe my missionwasclear.
Because I couldn’t imagine a world where I was pregnant with Sullivan London’s child and I didn’t love them for eternity. I couldn’t imagine a world where I was pregnant with Sullivan London’s child and I didn’ttellhim. Where I wasn’t there with him, back at the start, where we’d begun so many years ago, where Sully had looked at the sky and wondered what it would be like to raise his kids in the same place he’d grown up, on the same soil.
