Chapter Four: Everything

I sat in the car for a long time after Eli walked away.

He didn't get in his car right away either. I watched him in the rearview mirror, pacing a slow line beside his own bumper, one hand dragging through his hair, phone pressed to his ear like he was already calling someone, already starting whatever plan he'd meant when he said he'd figure it out with or without me.

I called Priya before he could finish whatever call he was making.

She picked up on the second ring. "Hey, so I actually did have one draft I forgot about, it was to my old boss and it just said..."

"Eli knows about the two nights."

Silence. Then, careful: "Knows how much?"

"He knows I don't know who the father is. He doesn't know who the other guy is, I didn't tell him, I wouldn't tell him, but Priya, he said something before he left that scared me more than anything else that happened today."

"What did he say?"

"That he'd figure it out with or without me."

"Okay." A pause, papers shuffling on her end, like she was pacing too. "Okay. Are you driving right now?"

"Not yet."

"Good, don't. Not until your hands stop shaking. I can hear it in your voice."

"I'm fine."

"You are seven months pregnant and you just had the worst conversation of your life in a parking lot. You are allowed to not be fine for like an hour, Mia, nobody is grading you on this."

I laughed, and it came out wet and a little broken, but it was a laugh, and it loosened something in my chest just enough that I could breathe around it.

"What am I supposed to do," I said. "He's going to go digging. I know he is. That's not a guy who lets a question sit there unanswered."

"Then you don't hand him anything to dig with. You go home. You tell your mom before anyone else does. You let today be today, and you deal with tomorrow's version of this tomorrow."

"That's not really an answer."

"It's the only one I've got right now. You want me to come over?"

"Not yet. Let me tell her first."

"Call me the second you're done. I mean it. The second."

"I will."

I drove home with the radio off, watching streets I'd driven a thousand times look completely unfamiliar, like the whole town had shifted two degrees while I wasn't paying attention. By the time I pulled into our driveway my hands had mostly stopped shaking, but my whole body felt hollowed out, scraped clean, the way you feel after crying so hard you run out of whatever it is that makes tears.

My mom was on the porch before I even got the car door fully open. She must have heard the engine. She always heard the engine.

She took one look at my face crossing the yard and didn't ask a single question. She just opened her arms, and I walked straight into them like I was eight years old again, and she held on tight enough that some small, stupid, grateful part of me finally exhaled for the first time since that parking lot.

"Okay," she said into my hair. "Okay. Come inside."

She sat me down at the kitchen table with a glass of water I didn't ask for and didn't touch, and she pulled a chair around so she was facing me instead of across from me, knees almost touching mine, the way she used to do when I was little and something at school had gone wrong.

"Tell me," she said.

So I did. All of it. The glitch, the text I never meant to send, Eli showing up outside St. Andrew's, the question in the parking lot I finally couldn't dodge anymore, the phone call I turned away from him so he couldn't see the name, the way his voice had gone flat and certain right before he walked off, the sentence that was still sitting in my chest like a stone. *I'll figure it out with or without you.* I told her things I hadn't even said to Priya, the guilt that lived under my ribs every single day, the two nights I still couldn't fully explain even to myself, the fear that had been sitting in my chest for six months that this exact afternoon was always going to happen eventually, that I'd just been borrowing time.

My mom listened to every word without interrupting once. When I finally stopped talking, she reached over and took both my hands in hers.

"You didn't do anything today except protect what wasn't his to know yet," she said. "That's not nothing, Mia. That's the hardest thing in the world some days."

"He's going to find out anyway. He said so himself."

"Maybe. But that's his choice to make, not yours to hand him. You don't owe anyone an answer you don't have."

I almost believed her. I wanted to believe her so badly my chest ached with it.

That was when we both heard it. A car pulling into the driveway too fast, gravel kicking up under the tires, and my mom's head turned toward the window before mine did.

"Mia," she said, in a voice that had gone very careful. "Whose car is that?"

I stood up so fast the chair scraped hard against the floor, and I looked past her out the window at a car I recognized immediately, because I'd ridden in it a hundred times a lifetime ago, back when Jordan Reyes still had a key to my house and a standing invitation to Sunday dinner.

He was already out of the car and walking toward our front door like he hadn't set foot on our porch in six months, like the two of us hadn't spent that entire time pretending the other one didn't exist.

My mom looked at me.

"That's not Eli," she said.