CHAPTER FIVE: Four Tests and A Kitchen Floor

Emma's POV

I am at Cara's apartment. 

She has gone to stay with a friend of hers so that I can have some solo space. 

My mother arrives at two in the afternoon with an overnight bag, a casserole dish that smells like something that can fix most things, and the expression of a woman who has been waiting for this phone call for considerably longer than she is ever going to say out loud.

She walks into the apartment and looks around at the clean surfaces and the expensive furniture and the art on the walls I have never chosen, and she sets the casserole dish down on the counter and opens her arms.

I walk straight into them.

She holds on for a while without saying anything and I press my face into her shoulder and let out a breath that feels like it has been stored behind my ribs for most of the past year.

"He said it over coffee," I say into her shoulder. "Like he was canceling a subscription."

"I know, sweetheart."

"Talia had a key, Mom. She came there this morning. With a key."

My mother's hand goes still on my back for a moment.

"Of course she did," she replies, in the tone of someone who is not remotely surprised and is extremely angry about not being remotely surprised.

I pull back and look at her face.

"You knew," I say.

"I suspected," she says carefully. "For a while."

"How long is a while?"

"Long enough that I am very glad you called me today." She touches my face briefly. "Are you okay?"

"I found a phonei n the guest room. His second phone." I look at her. "He married me with a six month exit plan, Mom. Even bfore the wedding, he had already decided."

My mother closes her eyes for exactly two seconds.

Then she opens them and says, "Sit down," and I sit at the counter and watch her move through Cara's kitchen with the calm authority of a woman who has navigated harder mornings than this and come out the other side every time.

She makes tea and sits across from me.

"Tell me everything," she says.

So I tell her everything.

The guest room. The phone. The six month plan. The messages from Talia reporting conversations I have never had, concerns I have never raised, words I have never said.

My mother listens to all of it without interrupting once.

When I finish she is quiet for a moment.

Then she stands up, picks up her overnight bag, and sets three pregnancy tests on the counter between us.

I stare at them.

"Mom."

"I stopped at two pharmacies," she says. "I told you I would."

"I might not even be..."

"Emma."

I pick up the first one and go to the bathroom and do the needful and wait for the right time and I finally muster the courage  check. 

Two lines.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub and look at them for a long time.

I come back out and stand in front of my mother in the kitchen.

Then I show her.

She looks at it.

Looks at me.

"Take the other two," she says.

I take the other two.

Positive. Positive.

Three tests. Three answers. No ambiguity.

I sit down on the kitchen floor for the second time today because the floor is still cool and solid and still has no opinions about me, and my mother sits down on the floor next to me, which is not something I have anticipated, but there she is, cross-legged on the tiles in her good trousers.

"Okay," she says.

"That's all you've got? Okay?"

"Okay means I'm with you," she says. "Okay means we figure it out. Okay means you are not doing this alone regardless of what you decide."

I look at her.

"I'm not telling him," I say.

She is quiet.

"Mom. He married me with an exit plan. He spent fourteen months believing things about me that weren't true because the woman he actually wanted was feeding him a version of me that didn't exist, and he never once came to me to ask if any of it was real." I press both palms flat against the kitchen tiles. "I am not going to hand him a reason to stay in my life because it's convenient for him. I would rather do this completely alone."

She looks at me for a long, careful moment.

"That is your decision," she replies. "And I will support it completely, whatever you decide." She covers my hand with hers. "But you are not alone. You will never be alone. Whatever this is, wherever you go, you have me."

I look at our hands on the kitchen floor and I feel something loosen in my chest, just enough to breathe around.

"I want to leave LA," I say.

"To where?"

"I don't know yet." I lean my head back against the cabinet. "Somewhere that doesn't feel like this year. Somewhere new."

My mother squeezes my hand.

"Then we find somewhere new," she replies.

We sit on the kitchen floor together for a while after that, not saying very much, while the casserole finishes in the oven and the Los Angeles afternoon goes gold outside the windows.

It is the most at home I have felt in any apartment in fourteen months... which probably says everything.