CHAPTER SIX

Aria’s POV

I sat with the acceptance letter and the pregnancy test side by side on my desk for three days before I made the decision.

It was a painful decision to make all by myself but there was no one to call.

That was the part nobody warned you about, it’s not about the fear, not the morning sickness, not even the math of how a single income covers two lives. The part that actually broke me open was sitting in that quiet apartment with two pieces of paper in front of me and realizing I had absolutely no one left to call.

My mother had passed when I was nineteen. Kara had been the only person I would have gone to instead. The person I built four years of trust around, the person who knew exactly how to talk me through a crisis.

But Kara was gone, her side of the apartment stripped bare, and whatever version of comfort she might have offered now belonged to a friendship that no longer existed.

Charles wasn’t an option either. He had made that decision for both of us the moment I walked into that bedroom, seeing his cock hung in my so-called best friend’s pussy.

I had two distant cousins upstate I hadn’t spoken to in years, an advisor at school who knew my name but not my life, and a string of acquaintances who would have offered sympathy without substance.

Sympathy don’t pay hospital bills. It doesn’t sit up with you at 3 a.m. when the fear got loud enough to swallow everything else.

So I sat alone with it.

I withdrew from the university on a Tuesday morning, the advisor’s office smelled faintly of stale coffee, signing forms that quietly erased two years of hardwork and ambition.

The woman behind the desk offered me a leave of absence instead, like she could see the precise shape of what I was giving up. I told her I’d think about it but I knew I wouldn’t.

I packed up my dorm room myself, no one came to help. I carried boxes down three flights of stairs alone, sold the furniture I couldn’t carry, and signed a new, cheaper lease in the downpart of the city where the rent matched what one person working two jobs could actually afford.

I decided that night, staring at the ceiling of an apartment that didn’t yet feel like mine, that whatever this pregnancy cost me, I would not regret it. I would build something tangible out of what I had left.

************************************************

Five Years Later

The smoke alarm went off at six-thirty in the morning, which was roughly the time I expected it to.

“Mom, it’s burning!”

“I know, baby, I know.” I yanked the pan off the burner and waved a dish towel under the alarm until it gave up shrieking. The eggs were a lost cause, blackened at the edges in a way that no amount of seasoning would fix. I scraped them into the bin and started over again, cracking two more into the pan while glancing at the clock above the burner.

Six thirty-three.

Bryan sat at the small kitchen table already dressed for school, his backpack on the chair beside him, swinging his legs with the restless energy of a five-year-old who had apparently decided sleep was optional that night.

“Can I have pancakes instead?” he asked.

“We had pancakes yesterday.”

“I liked them.”

“I know you did.” I plated the eggs properly this time and set them in front of him along with two slices of toast. “Eat fast. We’re already behind.”

We were always behind. That was the rhythm of our mornings had been for five years now, a controlled scramble between alarm and departure, fueled by whatever I could put together in the thirty minutes I had between waking up and needing to be at three places at once.

I worked two jobs that didn’t always cooperate with school hours.

Mornings at a small accounting firm downtown, where I’d finally put my two years of coursework to some use, doing data entry and basic bookkeeping for less than I deserved.

Evenings and weekends picking up whatever side work paid, from cleaning contracts, occasional fumigation gig. Anything that filled the gap between what the accounting job paid and what rent, daycare and Bryan’s growing list of needs actually cost.

It was exhausting in a way that had become so normal I’d stopped noticing it as exhaustion. It just was the water I swam in.

But Bryan made it worth it in ways I didn’t have language for. He had been a curious baby, an even more curious toddler, and now an entirely fearless five-year-old who asked questions faster than I could answer them and looked at the world like it owed him an explanation for everything in it.

“Mom.” He was watching me with that particular tilt of his head he got when something was working itself loose in his mind. “Why don’t I have a dad like Joel does?”

I kept my eyes on his lunch box, zipping it closed with more focus than the task required.

“Some families look different, baby,” I said. “Ours just looks like you and me.”

“But where is he?”

“Eat your eggs, Bryan.”

He studied me a beat longer, while I studied him quietly from the corner of my eyes. He is just five years old, and somehow already skilled at recognizing when a door had been gently but firmly closed. He went back to his plate without pushing further. He had a way of letting things go that I suspected wouldn’t last much longer. The questions were getting sharper every day.

I checked the clock again, it was seven-ten.

“Backpack,” I said, already reaching for my bag and his lunch box at once. “Shoes. Now please, we are so late.”

He scrambled down from the chair, grabbed his backpack, and was halfway into his shoes by the door when he said, with the casual confidence of someone announcing the weather, “Coach said we’re doing the football tournament today.”

I paused with my hand on the doorknob. “Today?”

“Yeah! I’m gonna score the most goals.” He grinned up at me, missing one front tooth, completely certain of his own glory.

“Football’s not goals, baby, it’s…” I gave up the correction halfway through, checking my watch instead. “Be careful out there, okay? Listen to your coach.”

“I will,” he said, in the breezy, unbothered tone of a child who had no intention of remembering that promise the moment the whistle blew.

I locked the door behind us and we headed down the stairs together, his small hand wrapped around two of my fingers, already chattering about which position he wanted to play.

I had no way of knowing, as we stepped out into the morning traffic, that within a few hours that football tournament would change the direction of both our lives entirely.