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But for one second, suspended in the air with my body not fully cooperating, I understood with total clarity what “after Nationals” actually costs if I get this wrong even once. Not just me. Not just my ankle, my landing, my season.

I sit on the bleachers with my hand pressed against my stomach, which I don’t usually do, which I’ve been carefully not doing for three weeks because doing it makes this feel more real than I’ve let myself feel it. I think: what am I actually doing.

Priya finds me a few minutes later, sitting down beside me with her own water bottle, and doesn’t say anything for a moment, just sits there in the specific companionable quiet she’s good at.

“You okay?” she asks, eventually. Careful.

“Yeah.” I manage a small smile. “Just shook me up a little.”

She studies me for a second longer than the moment calls for, the same way she’s been studying me for weeks now — reading, patient, waiting for the thing I’m not saying to become sayable. She doesn’t push either. Nobody in my life seems to push right now, which I used to think was a mercy and am starting to understand is also its own kind of loneliness.

“Take your time,” she says, and squeezes my arm, and goes back to the group.

I sit there a while longer, alone, my hand still resting against my stomach, and for the first time in three weeks I let myself really think about what’s underneath my hand. Not an abstraction. Not a complication to manage on a schedule. An actual, specific, real thing that was in the air with me thirty seconds ago, trusting my body to hold it steady the way I’m trusting four people I can’t see to catch me.

I’ve been so careful about managing the secret. I haven’t been careful enough about the thing the secret is actually protecting.

I go to Raven House straight from practice, still in my gear, hair still damp with sweat. He’s the only place I know how to go when something’s shaken loose in me and I don’t have language for it yet.

He opens the door and his face changes the second he sees mine.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I stumbled at practice. Kara caught me.” I try for light. It doesn’t land. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.” He pulls me inside, hands on my shoulders, searching my face with the specific intensity he brings to things that actually scare him. “Margo. What happened?”

I look at him. The real him. The one who’s been watching me for three weeks and not pushing. The one who’s earned more than the line I’ve been handing everyone. The one who deserves — God, he deserves so much more than what I’ve been giving him.

I get right up to the edge of it again.

“I just —” My voice cracks. “I got scared. That’s all. It was close, and I got scared, and I needed —”

“You needed me.” He says it quiet, certain, pulling me into his chest. “Okay. I’m here.”

I stand there with my face against his shirt, his heartbeat under my ear, and the words are right there. I’m pregnant, Theo. I’ve known for three weeks. I almost fell today with your baby inside me and I still haven’t told you. Sitting in my throat exactly the way they sat there Thursday night. Exactly the way they’ve sat there every single day since the bathroom floor at the Sailmaker.

I don’t say them.

But this time the almost is harder to walk back from than it’s ever been. This time I feel the shape of the words in my mouth long after I’ve swallowed them again. I know, standing in his arms with my heart still not fully settled from the fall that didn’t happen, that I’m running out of road on this.

That night, alone in my room, I do the thing I’ve been avoiding for three weeks.

Wren’s asleep. June’s light is off. The house has that specific late-night quiet that makes everything feel more permanent than it would in daylight. I sit cross-legged on my bed with my laptop. The corkboard watches me from across the room — LSAT prep, Nationals schedule, the ethics project deadline that’s long since come and gone. All of it still pinned up like a version of my life that doesn’t know yet what’s actually happening underneath it.

I open my laptop. I don’t search anything dramatic — no forums, no worst-case scenarios, nothing that would let me spiral the way I could very easily spiral right now. Just the practical questions. The ones I should have looked up the day I saw two lines instead of one.

Is it safe to continue competitive cheerleading in early pregnancy.

The results are not comforting and not catastrophic either. Careful, hedged, the specific language of medical information trying not to make promises it can’t keep. High-impact stunts. Fall risk. The specific phrase depends on individual circumstances. Doctor for we can’t tell you what to do without actually examining you. Fair. Also exactly the kind of answer I don’t have access to right now, because getting examined means admitting all of this out loud to someone with a medical license and a chart with my name on it.

The recommendation, consistent across every source, to talk to an actual doctor about my specific situation rather than trust anything general. I read four different articles saying some version of the same thing. I feel the specific frustration of a person who is very good at researching her way to an answer, running headfirst into a question that genuinely doesn’t have one. Not without more information than the internet can give me.

I sit with that for a long moment. Then, because I’m apparently doing this whole reckoning in one sitting, I search the other question. The one I’ve been not-thinking-about every time Theo and I fall into each other the way we can’t stop falling into each other.

Is sex safe during early pregnancy.

Generally yes, the internet tells me, for a low-risk pregnancy with no complications. Which I don’t know that I have. Which I haven’t confirmed with anyone. Confirming it with anyone means seeing a doctor. That means paperwork. My name in a system somewhere. The whole careful architecture of secrecy I’ve built over three weeks starting to show cracks in it I’m not ready for yet.