Page 94

“You sure? You look —”

“I’m fine, Kara.” Bright. Automatic. The specific tone that ends conversations before they become something.

She lets it go, because that’s what people do when I use that tone, which is exactly why I use it. But I sit on the bleachers for the rest of the water break with my stomach doing something slow and unpleasant. For the first time all week, the word I haven’t let myself think arrives anyway. Uninvited. It sits down next to me like it’s been waiting.

I don’t say it out loud. Not yet. I just carry it home.

By Thursday I can’t keep telling myself it’s stress.

The nausea’s not occasional anymore. It’s a low, steady presence most mornings, worst around eight, gone by ten, back again if I catch a wrong smell at the wrong time. Coffee, which I’ve never once in my life turned down, sends me straight to the bathroom the second I take a real sip. I pour it out and switch to tea, which helps, marginally, and I tell June it’s a New Year’s resolution I’m finally getting around to, four months late, which she accepts without question because June accepts most things without question.

I’m tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. The specific bone-deep exhaustion I associate with being sick, except I’m not sick — no fever, no sore throat, nothing I could point to and name. My chest feels different. Tender, in a way I notice every time I put on a sports bra for practice and immediately try not to notice, tucking it under probably nothing along with everything else I’ve been calling probably nothing for a week and a half now.

I catch myself doing the count without meaning to. Fourteen days since Charleston to now. Twelve days late. The numbers sit in my head at odd moments — mid-conversation with Sloane, mid-stretch at practice, mid-sentence in a text to Theo I don’t finish sending — like they’ve started running on a separate track from the rest of my thoughts, quiet and constant, refusing to be tucked away with everything else.

I do the count I’ve been avoiding. Late period, now going on twelve days. The specific week in Charleston. The specific choices we made there, twice, deliberately, both of us fully aware of what we were choosing.

I sit on my bed with my laptop closed and my hands in my lap and I let myself think the actual sentence, finally, all the way through: I might be pregnant.

I don’t cry. I don’t panic, exactly, though something in my chest is doing a very fast, very insistent thing that might be panic wearing a calmer coat. I do what I always do with anything this size. I build a plan.

Friday afternoon, I drive to a pharmacy in Northfield, twenty minutes out, a town where nobody knows my face and nobody’s going to mention to anyone at Whitmore that they saw Margo Ashby buying a pregnancy test.

I pay cash. I don’t make eye contact with the cashier — a bored college-aged guy who scans the box without a flicker of interest. I’m grateful for that, in a way that feels slightly unhinged given the size of what’s in the bag.

The drive back gives me twenty more minutes to think, and I use every one of them. Not spiraling — I don’t let myself spiral, not really, not yet — but building the case, the way I build every case, gathering the facts and laying them out in order.

Fact: I’ve never missed a pill. I set an alarm, I take it before I brush my teeth, it’s the one piece of my life that’s run on complete autopilot for three years and never once needed my attention until now.

Fact: no method is airtight. I know this. I’ve always known this, distantly, the way you know abstract statistics about things that happen to other people — a number in a pamphlet, never a number that was going to apply to me specifically.

Fact: the timing puts this at Charleston, which means this has been true for weeks and I’ve been carrying it without knowing, going to class and cheering and falling asleep against Theo’s chest with something already changing inside me the entire time. I think about the beach. The hand I put in his without deciding to. The shell still in my coat pocket. All of it happening while this was already quietly, invisibly true.

Fact: if this is real, nothing about the next several months looks the way I planned for it to look. Not law school applications. Not the internship I was going to apply for this summer. Not a single line on the corkboard, which suddenly feels like the world’s most elaborate plan for a life that might not exist anymore in the shape I built it.

I don’t let myself get to the next fact, the biggest one, until I’m parked outside the Sailmaker with the engine off and the bag on the passenger seat. Then I let it in, all the way, because there’s no more room to keep it out.

Theo.

The draft. The Tab. The development plan the Bruins built around a version of his senior year that doesn’t have room in it for this. Everything he’s been working toward since he was seventeen years old. Every sacrifice. Every dollar tracked and accounted for. The specific fragile architecture of a future he’s spent his whole life constructing brick by brick with almost nothing to work with.

And I might be about to hand him something that changes all of it.

I sit in the car for a long time before I go inside.

The house is empty. Wren’s at a team dinner. June’s at the library. I have the whole place to myself, which feels like either mercy or cruelty, I can’t decide which.

I lock the bathroom door anyway. Old habit. Even alone, some things need a locked door.

I read the instructions twice, though they’re not complicated. I do what they say. I set the test on the edge of the sink, face-down. I sit on the closed toilet lid, elbows on my knees, and watch the second hand on my phone move in a way that makes actual time feel like it’s lying to me.

Three minutes. I’ve never experienced three minutes with this specific texture before — thick, endless, every second arriving separately rather than in a rush, the way time usually does.

I pick it up when the timer goes off.

Two lines.

Clear. Immediate. No ambiguity, no need to tilt it toward the light or squint or wonder if I’m imagining the second line the way you can talk yourself into imagining anything you’re braced for. It’s just there. Definite. The kind of fact that doesn’t care whether I’m ready for it.