Chapter 2: Two Lines

The box sits on the bathroom counter for a long time before I touch it.

I've read the instructions twice already, though there isn't much to read. Pee on the stick. Wait three minutes. Two lines means one thing. One line means another.

Simple. Except nothing about this feels simple.

I sit on the edge of the bathtub with the test wrapped in a square of toilet paper, waiting, my knee bouncing without my permission. The bathroom light hums faintly overhead, too white, too honest. I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

I set my phone on the sink and start the timer.

Three minutes.

One hundred and eighty seconds to find out whether the last two weeks of exhaustion and pain and unexplained tears have a name.

I press my palm flat against my stomach, the way I did this morning at the kitchen table, except this time it isn't pain I'm bracing for.

"Please," I whisper, though I don't even know what I'm asking for. Please let it be nothing. Please let it be something. I don't know which answer I'm hoping for anymore. Both of them terrify me in different ways.

I stand up and pace the small space between the sink and the door. Three steps one way. Three steps back. My reflection catches me every time I turn, pale and wide-eyed, a stranger wearing my face.

I think about my mother, and how she would have known exactly what to say to me right now. I think about how there's no one else I can call, not really, not about this. My coworker would ask questions I'm not ready to answer. Everyone else in my life has drifted just far enough away that a moment like this one has nowhere to land except on me alone.

Alone.

The word sits heavy in my chest.

I glance at the phone. One minute left.

I sit back down on the edge of the tub because my legs don't want to hold me anymore. I fold my hands in my lap and stare at a crack in the tile by my foot, counting the seconds instead of watching the timer, because somehow that feels like it will make the waiting easier.

It doesn't.

The alarm goes off, sharp and sudden in the small room, and I flinch like it's shouted at me. I silence it with a shaking hand and sit there for another few seconds, just breathing, because once I look, there's no version of my life where I haven't looked.

"Okay," I whisper. "Okay."

I stand. I pick up the test from the counter.

I turn it over.

Two lines.

Not one faint, uncertain line that could be explained away. Two lines, clear and pink and undeniable, staring back at me from a small plastic window that has just rewritten everything I thought tomorrow was going to look like.

I don't move.

I don't breathe.

The test slips slightly in my fingers and I grip it tighter, as if I could somehow will the second line to disappear if I just held on hard enough.

It doesn't disappear.

"No," I whisper. My voice cracks in half. "No, no, no."

I sit back down hard on the edge of the tub, the test still clutched in my hand, and the tears come before I can stop them, before I can even try to hold myself together the way I do every single morning at that kitchen table.

There's no armor for this.

I press my free hand against my stomach, and something shifts in my chest — not just fear now, but something rawer, something that makes my whole body shake.

There's a life in there.

Somewhere underneath my hand, underneath skin and muscle and all the exhaustion I've been carrying for weeks, there is the very beginning of a life I never planned for, made in a night I've spent every day since trying not to think about.

"How am I going to do this alone?" I whisper into the empty bathroom.

No one answers. Of course no one answers. It's just me, sitting on the edge of a bathtub at nearly midnight, holding a piece of plastic that has just changed the entire shape of my future.

I don't know how long I sit there. Long enough that my legs go numb against the cold porcelain. Long enough that the tears dry on my face and leave that tight, salty feeling behind. Long enough that the shaking in my hands slows to something closer to stillness, even if nothing inside me feels still at all.

Eventually I stand. I wrap the test in tissue and set it carefully on the edge of the sink, like it's something fragile now, something that deserves to be handled with more care than I've handled anything in weeks.

I look at myself in the mirror one more time.

The woman looking back at me is still pale. Still hollow around the eyes. But there's something different in her now too, something underneath the fear that I can't quite name yet.

"Okay," I tell her, quieter this time. Steadier. "Okay. We'll figure it out."

I don't believe it completely. Not yet. But saying it out loud is the only thing keeping me from falling apart completely, and right now, that has to be enough.

I turn off the bathroom light and walk into the dark of my apartment, one hand still resting against my stomach, carrying a secret so large I don't yet know how I'm going to carry it through tomorrow, let alone whatever comes after.

For the first time all day, the ache in my body isn't the loudest thing I'm feeling.

Fear is.

And underneath the fear, so quiet I almost miss it, something else. Something that feels dangerously close to love, for a life I haven't even met yet.

I climb into bed without eating, without changing out of my work clothes, and I lie there in the dark with my hand still pressed to my stomach, staring at the ceiling until the sky outside my window turns from black to grey all over again.

Tomorrow, I tell myself, I'll figure out what to do.

Tonight, I just need to survive knowing.

I don't remember falling asleep, but I must have, because the next thing I know, grey morning light is pressing against my eyelids and my alarm is buzzing somewhere on the nightstand.

For one merciful second, my mind is empty. Then it all comes rushing back — the bathroom, the timer, the two pink lines — and my hand finds my stomach again before I'm even fully awake.

Still there. Still real.

I lie still for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, waiting to feel something other than fear. It doesn't come. Not yet. Just the same tight, breathless feeling from last night, settled now into something quieter, something I'm going to have to learn how to live inside of.

I reach for my phone before I can talk myself out of it.

My thumb hovers over the screen. I could call in sick. I could stay in this bed all day with the blanket pulled over my head and pretend the last twelve hours didn't happen.

Instead, I open my messages and search for the number I saved months ago and never used — a clinic two neighborhoods over, the kind of place where no one knows my name or my face or the sound of my voice when it shakes.

My hand trembles as I dial.

"Riverside Women's Clinic, how can I help you?" A woman's voice, brisk and pleasant, the kind that has said this same sentence a thousand times today already.

I open my mouth and nothing comes out for a second.

"Hello?" she says.

"Sorry — yes. I'd like to make an appointment." My voice sounds strange to my own ears, too careful, too controlled. "As soon as possible, if there's anything available."

"Can I ask what it's regarding?"

I close my eyes.

"I think I'm pregnant," I say, and saying it out loud to a stranger makes it more real than the test ever did. "I need to confirm it."

There's a pause, the sound of typing, and then, "I have an opening tomorrow afternoon. Would that work?"

"Yes." The word comes out too fast, too relieved. "Yes, that works."

She takes my details. I answer in short, flat sentences, my free hand pressed against my stomach the entire time, as if I need to keep reminding myself this call is real and not something I dreamed up in the middle of the night.

When I hang up, I sit on the edge of my bed for a long moment, phone still warm in my hand, and let out a breath I feel like I've been holding since the timer went off last night.

Tomorrow, someone will tell me, officially, what I already know.

Tomorrow, this will stop being a secret I'm keeping only from myself.

I get up. I get dressed. I go to work and I smile the practiced smile and I answer questions in a voice that doesn't shake, because I have exactly one more day before everything becomes real in a way I can't undo, and I intend to spend it exactly the way I've spent every difficult day of my life.

Alone, and holding it together, one careful breath at a time.