ONE LAST TEXT

"Ma'am, you're going to want a bigger bag."

I looked up. The cashier at Baker's Pharmacy was maybe sixteen, gum snapping, staring at the mountain of prenatal vitamins and ginger candy sliding toward her on the belt like she'd caught me buying evidence.

"I'm good," I said and zipped my jacket up another inch even though it was eighty degrees outside and I was one bad decision away from heatstroke.

"It's summer," she said.

"I run cold."

She didn't believe me,nobody ever believed me. I paid, grabbed the bag before she could ask anything else, and pushed out through the sliding doors into air that smelled like hot pavement and somebody's cigarette three cars down.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

Priya:did you see this phonegate thing going around

Priya:apparently a software bug is sending people's old unsent drafts. like YEARS old. my cousin got exposed for a text he never sent his landlord calling him a slumlord

I laughed out loud, alone, in a parking lot, like a crazy person.

me: that's insane

me: somebody out there is about to get the surprise of their life

Priya:you good? you don't have anything sitting in your drafts do you

I stood there with my thumb over the screen a second too long.

me: lol no. I don't even use drafts like that

Which was true,mostly.

I got in the car,looked in the mirror to see my tired yet pretty face with my black long hair doing it's thing,I cranked the AC, and let it blast my face until I stopped sweating through my shirt. I put a hand flat against my stomach, felt the little flutter that had started showing up more the last few weeks, like something knocking politely from the inside.

"Okay," I said. "We're okay. Just gotta get through this appointment."

I put the car in reverse.

My phone buzzed again.I almost ignored it. My arm was slung over the passenger seat, eyes on the mirror, foot on the brake. But something made me glance down, and it wasn't Priya's name lighting up the screen this time.

It said "Delivered."

Which wouldn't have meant anything except I hadn't sent anyone a text.

I picked the phone up slow, like it might be something with teeth. My heart was already going before my brain caught up to why.

I opened it.

It sat at the top of a thread I hadn't touched in six months. A thread I'd trained myself not to scroll to at two in the morning, not to open, not to reread like some kind of wound I kept picking at.

Eli.

I knew before I finished the first line that it was old. I remembered writing it. Floor of my closet, knees against my chest, crying so hard I had to put the phone down twice to keep from smearing the screen.

I had never hit send.I was sure of that. I would have staked my life on that.

"Delivered. 2 minutes ago."

I read the first line in my own handwriting, my own voice, six months old and never meant to leave my phone.

"I know I'm not supposed to say this anymore, but I still think about you every day and I don't know how to stop and I don't know if I want to."

There was more underneath it. Things I hadn't said to Priya, to my mom, to my own reflection most mornings, because saying them made them real, and I could not afford for them to be real. Not with everything else sitting on top of it. Not with what I still hadn't told anyone.

The parking lot went soft and blurry at the edges.

My phone buzzed a third time and I flinched like it had touched me.

Eli:we need to talk

Three words. No comma, no question mark, nothing soft about it. I typed "that was old, ignore it" and deleted it. I typed "how much did you read" and deleted that too, because it didn't matter, because the answer was all of it, because that's how phones work.

Eli: are you gonna answer me or not

My hands were shaking too hard to drive. I put the car back in park and sat there with the AC roaring and my vitamins sweating condensation onto the passenger seat, and I thought about the two people in the world who might be standing on the other side of a question like that, and how only one of them had just read that I never stopped loving him.

I turned the phone face down.

"Not now," I said out loud, to the dashboard, to nobody. "I need time."

I did not have time.

I found that out forty minutes later, walking out of St. Andrew's with an appointment card in my hand and my jacket finally unzipped because the waiting room had been a furnace. I stepped through the sliding doors and stopped dead.

A car I hadn't seen in six months sat crooked across two parking spots, like whoever parked it hadn't cared enough to do it right.

Eli was leaning against the hood, arms crossed,still his handsome tall self,eyes locked on the doors like he'd been watching every single person who walked out of them.

He saw me. He pushed off the car and started walking straight at me, no hesitation, no small talk face, just a boy who had read something he was never supposed to read and wanted answers in real time.

"Mia." His voice cracked on the one syllable of my name.

"How did you even know I was here." My own voice came out thin.

"I didn't." He stopped a few feet away, breathing like he'd run there. "I was going to your house after I waited for your response in vain and I saw your car pull in into the hospital and I followed it. Mia, what the hell is going on, I read what you..."

His eyes dropped but Not to my face.

I watched it happen in real time, watched him go still the way people go still right before something breaks, watched his gaze travel down to the unzipped jacket I'd forgotten I was even wearing open, to the shape underneath it that no amount of loose fabric could hide anymore, not at seven months, not standing three feet from him in direct sunlight.

Nobody said anything for what felt like a very long time.

"Eli," I started.

"Whose is it," he said.

Not 'are you pregnant.'  Not 'how far along.' He already knew both of those the second his eyes landed on me. He went straight to the only question that mattered, the one I had been rehearsing an answer for in my head for six months and had never once managed to actually finish out loud, not to my mother, not to Priya, not to myself in the dark.

"Whose is it, Mia."

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.