Chapter One

 

I found out I was pregnant on a Tuesday morning.

I stood in the bathroom of our apartment, staring at those two pink lines until the cold from the tiles came up through my bare feet and my legs started to go numb. I didn't move. I couldn't. I just stood there and stared and waited for the fear to arrive, because I had always assumed that if this ever happened, fear would be the first thing I felt.

It wasn't.

The first thing I felt was joy. Pure, reckless, terrifying joy. The kind that fills your whole chest so fast it almost hurts.

I pressed the test against my chest and laughed — the quiet kind, the kind you keep inside your body because it's too new and too fragile to let out yet. Eight years with Daniel Ashford. Eight years of loving a man who moved through the world like it was built for him, and now this.

We were going to have a baby.

I practiced telling him all day. In the shower, in the car, in the bathroom at work between client meetings, standing in front of the mirror whispering to myself like a woman rehearsing a marriage proposal. Daniel, I'm pregnant. Daniel, I have something to tell you. Daniel, we're going to be parents.

None of it felt big enough. The words kept shrinking on my tongue.

His phone was on the bathroom counter when I came out.

I hadn't noticed it earlier. He must have left it when he rushed out that morning — one of his usual exits, jacket half on, coffee abandoned, already on a call before he hit the front door. I picked it up to move it and the screen lit up in my hand.

A message preview. No content, just a name.

Claire.

I set the phone back down.

I didn't know who Claire was. I had never heard that name from Daniel in eight years. I told myself it was nothing — a colleague, a work contact, one of the dozens of names that moved through his professional life without ever reaching mine.

I told myself that and I almost believed it.

I put the test in my bag and went to work.

He texted at nine that night. Working late. Don't wait up.

I waited up. I always waited up. That was one of those things I never said out loud — that I couldn't settle properly until I heard his key in the lock, until I knew he was home. I had loved him for so long and so completely that his absence felt like a physical thing. A weight. A gap in the room where he was supposed to be.

He walked in at half past eleven. Jacket over one shoulder, tie loosened, that particular brand of exhaustion that somehow still looked like confidence on him. He was that kind of man. The kind who made being tired look deliberate.

"Hey." He dropped the jacket on the armchair. Not the hook by the door. Never the hook by the door. I had stopped mentioning it years ago.

"Hey." I stood up. My heart was moving too fast. "Can we talk?"

Something in my face made him set his phone face-down on the counter without being asked. He almost never did that. I took it as a good sign. I was always looking for good signs with Daniel — small permissions to hope.

I reached into my bag. I set the test on the counter between us.

He looked at it without speaking. I stood on the other side of the counter and watched his face and waited for it to change. I had imagined this moment so many times on the drive home — his expression opening up, his arms coming around me. In the version I had rehearsed, he was scared but happy. In the version I had rehearsed, he pulled me close and said Maya and told me we'd figure it out together.

He looked up.

His eyes were calm.

"Get rid of it," he said.

I heard the words. I processed the words.

I waited for him to smile. To tell me he was joking. To let the mask drop and show me the man I had spent eight years believing was underneath it.

He didn't.

He just looked at me with those calm, steady eyes, and I understood — slowly and then all at once — that there was no joke coming. That this was exactly what it looked like.

"Daniel—"

"I'm not ready, Maya." His voice was even. Measured. The exact same tone he used in business meetings when someone brought him a problem he hadn't anticipated. "We're not ready. This isn't the right time."

"We've been together eight years," I said. The words came out before I'd chosen them.

"That doesn't mean we're ready for a child." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'll pay for it. We can find somewhere next week. It doesn't have to be complicated."

Doesn't have to be complicated.

I looked at the test on the counter. At the two small lines I had pressed against my chest that morning like something sacred. Like something worth protecting.

I picked it up. Slipped it back into my bag. When I looked at him again I made absolutely sure my face showed him nothing.

"Okay," I said.

He nodded, picked up his phone, and went to the fridge.

I sat back on the couch. I turned the television on. I watched it for an hour without seeing any of it — laughed when the audience laughed, reached for my water glass at the commercial break, performed being fine so thoroughly that I almost believed my own performance.

He went to bed at midnight. He didn't check on me. He didn't ask if I was okay. He just said goodnight and disappeared down the hall like it was any other evening.

I sat alone in the dark living room, held my own hands, and didn't make a sound. I had learned a long time ago not to cry where Daniel could see me. He found it hard to respond to. He had told me so himself, early in our relationship, and I had taken that information and used it ever since to manage myself around him.

Even now. Even tonight. I was still doing that.

I sat in the quiet and held the wreckage of the last hour inside my chest and did not let a single piece of it out.

That was the first mistake. Not the only one. But the first.