Chapter Five: Sunday Dinner

 I got to the door before my mom did.

Jordan was standing on the porch with his hand halfway raised like he'd been about to knock and lost his nerve at the last second. He looked different than I remembered. Thinner. Tired in a way that lived somewhere deeper than his face, in the set of his shoulders, in the way he stood like he'd forgotten how to take up space without apologizing for it.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

Neither of us moved. Behind me I could feel my mom hovering in the kitchen doorway, not coming closer, not leaving either, watching this like she wasn't sure yet whether she needed to step in.

"Can I come in," Jordan said. "Or is that not, I don't know, is that not okay right now."

"You drove twenty minutes to ask me that on the porch?"

"I drove twenty minutes because Eli called me an hour ago sounding like his whole world caved in, and when I asked him what happened he just said "ask Mia" and hung up on me. He's my best friend, Mia. He doesn't do that. He doesn't just hang up. So yeah, I got in the car."

I stepped back and let him in, because six months of distance didn't erase fourteen years of him walking through that door like he lived there half the time, because some habits are older than the reasons you have for breaking them.

My mom's face did something complicated when she saw him properly, standing in her kitchen light for the first time in half a year. Not angry. Not exactly warm either. Something in between, careful, the way you look at a photograph of somebody after everything in it has changed meaning.

"Jordan," she said.

"Hi, Mrs. Bennett." His voice cracked a little on it. "I know I probably shouldn't just show up like this."

"Sit down," she said. Not an invitation. A decision she'd already made for both of us. "I'll make tea."

"You don't have to..."

"I'm making tea, Jordan."

He sat. I sat across from him, my hands wrapped around a mug I still hadn't touched from an hour ago, and for a second none of us said anything while the kettle ticked and hissed on the stove behind us.

"What did Eli actually say," I asked. "Word for word, if you remember it."

"Not much. He sounded wrecked. Kept saying something about a text he wasn't supposed to see, and then he asked me something weird, like he was testing me, and when I didn't know what he meant he just told me to ask you and hung up." Jordan shook his head. "I've called him back four times. Straight to voicemail."

He didn't know. I could see it plainly in his face, in the confusion sitting there instead of guilt, in the way he was looking at me like I held the missing piece of a puzzle he didn't even know he was part of. Whatever had happened between us that night, however hazy and unfinished it lived in my own memory, it clearly didn't live the same way in his. He wasn't hiding anything from me across that table. He genuinely didn't know.

"I'm pregnant," I said.

I hadn't planned to say it that plainly. It just came out, flat, into the space between us, because I didn't have the energy left that day to build up to anything softer.

Jordan went still. "Okay," he said slowly. "I mean. I'd heard rumors, but I didn't want to just ask you about something like that out of nowhere."

"There's a bug going around. PhoneGate. It sent Eli an old text I wrote him, something I never meant for him to see, and when he showed up to talk about it he saw that I was showing, and things kind of unraveled from there."

"That explains the mystery test thing," Jordan said, half to himself. "He must have thought I already knew something."

"You don't," I said. It wasn't a question. I needed to hear him confirm it anyway.

"Know what?" He looked at me, genuinely lost, and something in my chest twisted painfully at how easy it was to believe him. "Mia, what am I supposed to know?"

My mom set two mugs down in front of us and a third in front of her own chair, and instead of leaving us alone the way I half expected her to, she sat down too, folding her hands around her mug like she had every right to be part of this conversation, which, I realized, she probably did.

"You don't have to explain anything to him you're not ready to," she said to me, quiet, careful, not looking at Jordan when she said it.

"I know."

Jordan glanced between us, and I watched him decide not to push, which was such a Jordan thing to do, always reading a room before he asked to be let further into it.

"Whatever's going on," he said, "with Eli, with you, with any of it, I'm not here to make it worse. I just needed to see for myself that you were okay. He sounded like something had actually broken, and I couldn't sit at home not knowing if that meant you too."

"I'm okay," I said, which wasn't entirely true, but it was true enough for that kitchen, that hour, that mug of tea going cold between my hands.

"Okay," he said, and he almost smiled, tired and real. "Okay. Good."

His phone buzzed on the table between us, screen lighting up face down, and he glanced at it the way you glance at something you already know might be bad news, like his body had learned to brace before his eyes even caught the name.

He turned it over.

Whatever he saw on that screen took every bit of color out of his face at once.

"Jordan," I said. "What is it."

He didn't answer me. He was already standing, already reaching for his keys, his hands shaking in a way that had nothing to do with anything we'd just talkedabout.

"It's my mom's hospital," he said. "They never call unless it's bad."