Chapter Thirteen

Jules' POV

I picked the city by accident.

I had the map app open on my phone, zoomed out until the whole country was a thumbnail, and I pressed my finger down without looking. When I looked, it landed on Millhaven — a mid-sized city in the northwest I had driven through exactly once on a trip to see a college friend. I remembered a river. I remembered a bookshop with a green door.

I took it as a sign. Nana would have approved of the methodology.

The drive took two days. I stopped overnight at a highway motel and ate vending machine crackers and a convenience store apple and felt, the whole time, that I was driving away from one life and hadn't yet arrived at the next one. The space in between was just highway and radio static and the steady, ordinary miracle of the baby growing without asking my permission.

I was fourteen weeks by then. Showing, barely, but enough that I'd had to let out the waistband on my jeans. I talked to the bump in the car the way I'd been talking to it since the cemetery — not constantly, not in the cloying way people sometimes did on the internet, but the way you talk to someone who's listening and just can't respond yet. I described the landscape. I named the states as we crossed them. I explained the concept of rest stops.

"This is what travel is like," I said, somewhere in Idaho. "Mostly it's waiting and snacks. But the view is good sometimes."

I found Madeline on Craigslist.

She was subletting a two-bedroom apartment in the east part of Millhaven — an older building, slightly crooked floors, a kitchen that got morning light. The listing said no pets, no drama, short-term okay. The photograph showed a living room with bookshelves along one wall and a plant in the window, alive and well-watered, which told me something important about the person who lived there.

I called the number. She picked up on the second ring.

"Before you say anything," I said, "I need to tell you something."

"Okay." She sounded amused rather than alarmed.

"I'm pregnant. Nineteen weeks. I'm not sick, I'm not difficult, I will not have wild parties, and I have a reliable income." The remote editing job I'd found three days earlier — a small publisher looking for a freelance manuscript editor. "I just need a place that doesn't know me yet."

A pause.

"Third floor," she said. "There's no elevator. That going to be a problem?"

"No."

"You cook?"

"Yes."

"Good, because I'm terrible." Another pause. "You want to see it Friday?"

"I'll be there Thursday."

She laughed. It was a good laugh — the kind that came from somewhere real. "Thursday it is."

Madeline Torres was thirty-four, a high school art teacher with paint permanently on her forearms and the most direct gaze I had ever encountered on a stranger. She opened the door on Thursday afternoon, looked at me — visibly pregnant, one duffle bag over each shoulder, standing in her hallway like something the wind had deposited — and said, "You look like you've been driving for a week."

"Two days," I said.

"Close enough." She took one of the duffles off my shoulder. "Come in. I made soup. Real soup, not can soup, so don't get smug about it."

I crossed the threshold and the apartment was exactly like its photograph: warm and slightly cluttered and full of things that had been kept because they were loved. The books were real books, spines cracked and pages marked. The plant in the window had a name written on a small clay tag in the pot — Gerald.

"You named your plant," I said.

"Didn't you name your bump?"

I looked down at my stomach. "Not yet."

"You've got time." She handed me a bowl of soup and pointed me toward the kitchen table. "Sit. Eat. Tell me whatever you want to tell me, and skip whatever you don't."

I sat. I ate. I looked at this woman I had met twelve minutes ago and thought: this is what a lifeline looks like.

"I left a marriage," I said. "It wasn't my choice, but I left. The father doesn't know about the baby." I wrapped my hands around the bowl. "I'm not — I'm not hiding exactly. I just need some time to get solid before I figure out the next thing."

Madeline nodded. She wasn't asking follow-up questions. She wasn't looking at me the way people look at you when they're cataloging your mistakes. She just nodded, and refilled my bowl without asking, and said: "I've got a reading lamp in the spare room that flickers. I've been meaning to fix it. You can't use it after nine or it'll drive you insane."

"Okay," I said.

"Good. You're here if you want to be here. And if you need to go, you go. No drama either way."

I thought about the envelope in my duffle bag. Still unopened. The letter from someone named Dorian Arthur who knew my mother.

"Thank you," I said.

She waved it off. "Don't thank me. You said you cook. Make it worth my while."

I laughed. I hadn't laughed in two weeks. It came out a little ragged, a little surprised by itself, but it was real, and Madeline smiled at her soup like she'd planned it.

I stayed.