Chapter 4: Hello New Life

Kiera's POV 

I was pregnant.

I stared at the test on the bathroom counter for a long time without moving, just sat there on the cold edge of the sink, my back against the mirror, the white stick between my fingers like it was something that might change it answer if I waited long enough.

It didn't. There were two lines, clear and permanent. I sat down, looked at it, picked it up again and set it back down.

The apartment was quiet around me, my new apartment, the one I'd found after he kicked me out and I'd moved in and told myself it was a new beginning.

I looked at the test and the question sat at the back of my head. Whose child was it?

It could Denise, who two months ago had me pressed into the headboard of our bedroom at two in the morning, hands everywhere, whispering things in my ear that I'd been stupid enough to believe. We hadn't been good in months but the sex had still be there, the body doesn't care about the state of a marriage and I'd wanted, he'd taken and apparently somewhere in the mess of what we were, this could have happened.

Or was it the stranger with no name, beautiful blue eyes in a dark bar and had clever hands and a mouth that had spent an hour making me completely forget I was a woman whose life had just been blown apart. It was just one night, I'd told myself, it meant nothing, cost nothing. Apparently it had an opinion about that.

I didn't know which, I might never know. Both options were disasters either ways.

I couldn't go back to Denise. He was the man who'd been sleeping with my best friend in our bed and had asked for a divorce before I'd finished screaming. How am I supposed to go back to him with this? Watch Ashley's face when she found out? Spend the rest of life inside a humiliation I'd barely survived the first time?

Finding the stranger wasn't a good option. He was a man with no name,in a city of millions of people from a bar I'd only been to once. How was it supposed to meet him? Hello remember me? We didn't exchange. I think I'm pregnant with your child. Is that a problem?

There was no good option. Neither was possible.

I slid off the counter, washed my hands, looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment. The woman looking back at me was not the woman who'd stood in her bedroom two months ago watching her marriage go down the drain. She was harder now.

I walked out of the bathroom, picked up my phone and called Bailey.

It rang twice before she picked up. "Kiera, how you doing?"

"Is your offer still open?" I asked. "Can I come to London?"

She was silent for half a second. "When?"

"Soon." I said quickly. "I've got tickets, I want to come n..."

"Yes." She didn't let me finish the sentence. "Come, I'll make up the room tonight."

I exhaled, the first real breath I'd taken since the bathroom counter. "Bailey..."

"Don't thank me. Just get on the plane and text me the arrival time." She paused. "Are you okay?"

I looked around the apartment. The bare walls, the two suitcases I'd never fully unpacked, the ticket sitting on the dresser. I'd had second thoughts about leaving, but I guess this was my sign to.

"I will be," I said.

I packed what was important.

It was not much. Just necessary things, clothes, my passport, my notebook I had before I met Denise, my mother's watch. That was enough.

I did not call Denise. I had nothing to say that the silence didn't already say better, neither did I text Sabrina, my former best friend, now a current ghost, a name I was already training myself not to think. I did not call Ashley, there was no need to, no need to write a letter or leave an explanation or perform one final graceful for people who didn't let me leave gracefully the first time.

I moved through the apartment room by room, from the bathroom to the kitchen, making sure I had everything I came for and nothing I didn't.

In the bedroom doorway I stopped.

The ring sat on the dresser. The gold band with a good diamond, four years of weight compressed into something that caught the morning light and sparkled like it meant nothing had happened.

I looked at it, I walked past it, and got my ticket.

I closed the front door behind me, took the elevator down, wheeled my suitcase through the lobby and got into the car I'd booked the night before, like I'd known, the signs were clear. The driver loaded my bag and I slid into the backseat without looking at the building.

The plane lifted off JFK eleven forty-seven in the morning.

I watched New York tilt away below me through the small oval window, the grid or streets, the silver flash of the river, the skyline I'd lived inside for eight years pulling back and back and back until it was just distance.

I waited for the feeling. The feeling of grief or the guilt or the particular ache of leaving the life you thought you were going to have. I'd braced for it since the bathroom counter, prepared to feel it somewhere over the Atlantic but it didn't come.

What came instead was lighter, quieter. The relief of someone who had finally stopped pretending something was survivable, possible and finally admitted the truth that it wasn't, it never had been, and surviving it had cost her enough.

The city disappeared. 

The cloud covering it like a curtain. I leaned back in my seat, my hands resting on my stomach naturally, just a moment and closed my eyes.

Goodbye, New York City. I thought.

Hello New Life.