Chapter 1: Two Pink Lines

They say your life can change in two minutes.

Mine changed in two pink lines.

I'd been staring at the pregnancy test for so long that the word "𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦" had started to blur at the edges, like if I looked at it hard enough it would rearrange itself into something less catastrophic. It didn't. It just sat there on the edge of my bathroom sink, glowing on that little digital screen with the kind of calm confidence that I absolutely did not have, while the November rain hammered against the single window above the toilet like it was personally offended by everything happening in this room.

I was twenty-one years old. I was a junior at Velmoor University studying literature because I loved words more than I loved common sense, apparently, and I was supposed to be thinking about my thesis and my internship applications and the very long list of responsible adult things I had been putting off since September. I was not supposed to be standing barefoot on cold bathroom tile at seven in the morning, gripping the sink so hard my knuckles had gone white, staring at two pink lines that had just casually detonated my entire future.

My phone buzzed on the floor beside me and I nearly knocked the test into the sink.

Bryan: You coming to the game tonight? Maya saved you a seat.

I stared at that message for a long time, longer than was probably normal because seeing Bryan's name on my screen in that particular moment felt like the universe was playing some kind of cruel joke on me. Bryan Rollins. Maya's older brother. The boy who had taught me to parallel park in an empty church lot the summer before junior year when I'd failed my driving test twice and was convinced I was going to be the first person in history to spend her entire adult life relying on public transport. The boy who showed up at every single one of my birthdays, even the ones I'd told literally no one about, always with the right snack and the wrong excuse for why he happened to be in the neighbourhood. The boy I had been quietly, stupidly, completely and embarrassingly in love with for six years, who had absolutely no idea, and who was currently texting me about basketball while I stood here holding confirmation that I was pregnant by someone who was not him. Not even close to him. Not even in the same galaxy as him.

What was I supposed to tell him; 𝘏𝘦𝘺 𝘉𝘳𝘺𝘢𝘯, 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘯𝘺 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺. 𝘊𝘢𝘯'𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵...𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘯 𝘮𝘺 𝘦𝘯𝘥. 𝘐'𝘮 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘣𝘺 𝘢 𝘨𝘶𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘧𝘪𝘢 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶, 𝘢 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘴 𝘰𝘯, 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘤???

I set the phone face-down on the floor.

A different number buzzed almost immediately after, one I had deliberately saved under no name because giving it a name would have made the whole thing too real, and I had been very committed to pretending it wasn't real for the past three weeks. Three weeks of carrying a pregnancy test around in my bag like it was a bomb I was too scared to detonate. Three weeks of eating crackers at 6am and telling my roommate Priya it was a new wellness thing. Three weeks of lying to myself so thoroughly that I had almost started to believe it.

𝘞𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬.

Three words. No greeting, no punctuation after the period, no warmth of any kind, just the kind of message that landed in your chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through everything.

But I knew who it was. My stomach dropped so fast I had to grab the sink again, the marble cold and solid under my palms, and I focused on that, the cold, the solid, the real because the rest of the room had started tilting in a way I didn't appreciate.

Because that message wasn't from Bryan.

And this baby wasn't his either.

I pressed both hands over my face and told myself to breathe, which was excellent advice that my body completely ignored. Because the moment I closed my eyes, I didn't see Luca Wolfe's face, not at first. I saw Bryan. Bryan doing that thing he did when he knew I was hiding something, where he'd go very quiet and just look at me with those steady eyes until I cracked and told him everything, because I had never once in six years been able to lie to him successfully. Bryan, who was probably at his apartment two miles from campus right now, making coffee and listening to whatever playlist he had on rotation this week, completely unaware that my world had just folded in half.

Then Luca surfaced anyway. He always did, eventually, like something that lived in the deep water of my thoughts and came up when I least wanted it to. Dark eyes and a particular quality of silence that felt less like peace and more like the moment before a storm decides what it's going to destroy. The way he had looked at me the first night we met, across a room that was too loud and too crowded and full of people I didn't know, like I was a problem he was trying to decide whether to solve or become. Four months of something I had never found the right word for, not a relationship exactly, not casual either, something in between that lived entirely in the dark, that I hadn't told Maya about and definitely hadn't told Bryan about and had barely admitted to myself.

Something that had apparently produced consequences.

Three knocks on the bathroom door made me jump so hard I bit my own tongue.

"Natalie?" His voice came through the wood, deep, familiar, the specific frequency that had been making my heart do complicated things since I was fifteen years old. "You've been in there for like twenty minutes. You okay?"

Bryan.

I looked at the door. I looked at the test. I looked at my hands, which had not stopped shaking since approximately the moment the result appeared, and I made the very adult decision to lie through my teeth.

"Yeah, I'm fine!" My voice came out remarkably steady, which honestly felt like my one achievement of the morning. "Stomach bug. Give me a sec."

A pause. Then, quieter: "Do you need anything? I can go get Maya, or..."

"I'm fine, Bryan. I promise."

That's it, Bryan was too good, he's the man you brought to your parents for marriage and Luca Wolfe was the kind of guy your parents called the cops on...

But I was not fine. I was the opposite of fine. I was standing in a bathroom at Velmoor University with a positive pregnancy test and a text from a man who didn't knock on doors because he didn't need to, who arrived places the way weather arrived, not asking permission, simply happening and I was approximately thirty seconds from either crying or passing out, possibly both.

I wrapped the test in tissue. Buried it at the bottom of my makeup bag under foundation and mascara and three weeks of denial. Washed my hands. Looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment, same face, same wide eyes, same wavy hair that Maya had once called "main character hair" as a compliment, though right now I felt like very much a side character in someone else's disaster.

My phone buzzed again.

𝘐 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘢𝘸 𝘪𝘵. 𝘋𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘥𝘰 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘱𝘪𝘥. 𝘐'𝘮 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶.

The chill that moved through me had nothing to do with the cold tile under my feet.

Luca Wolfe was coming here.

I unlocked the bathroom door, and there was Bryan, leaning against the hallway wall in that grey hoodie, my grey hoodie, the one I had stolen at a bonfire in tenth grade and never given back. He straightened when he saw me, eyes doing that quick, careful scan of my face that meant he already knew something was wrong and was deciding how hard to push.

"You look pale," he said.

𝘐 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘢 𝘨𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘵.

"Dining hall shrimp," I said. "You know how it is."

We didn't have shrimp at the dining hall today. He didn't call me on it, just stepped closer and pressed the back of his hand to my forehead the way he'd done a hundred times before, warm, steady, so unbearably familiar that something in my chest pulled tight and painful.

"You're not warm," he murmured, frowning. "Come on. Lie down. I'll make you tea."

Tea. He was offering me tea while my phone was burning a hole in my pocket and the father of my unborn child was somewhere on his way across the city in a car that cost more than my dad's house.

"Bryan..." I started.

And then we both heard it. An engine, pulling into the car park below, low, expensive, the kind of sound that didn't belong anywhere near a university campus. The kind that made you look without knowing why.

Bryan's jaw went tight. He turned toward the window at the end of the hall, then back to me, and something in his expression had shifted into something careful and very, very still.

"Natalie," he said quietly. "Whose car is that?"

My phone buzzed one final time. I didn't have to check it to know what it said...

"𝘐'𝘮 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦".

I was out of time. Out of lies. Out of being the good girl from the good home.

I met Bryan’s eyes. My first crush. My safe place. My biggest what-if.

And I realized, with a twist in my gut that had nothing to do with morning sickness, that I was about to ruin everything.