A Small Opening

For a week they were polite strangers.

They shared meals. They shared a house. They shared a bed, with a river of cold cotton between them. Toria answered in single words and went to bed early. Chriss watched her across the table, and she pretended not to notice.

The nausea didn't go away. Neither did the dizziness. Neither did the calendar.

On the eighth morning, she bought a test from a pharmacy across town and hid it in the bottom of her bag like contraband. She wasn't ready to look. If she looked, it would be real. And if it was real, she'd have to decide what kind of mother to be to a child who was already a clause in a contract.

Her phone buzzed.

Chriss: Dressing up casual tonight. Business thing. Be ready at 6.

No question mark. No please.

She almost said no. Then she looked at her reflection in the pharmacy window: long hair dragging at her shoulders like an old promise, the girl who waited by windows.

She walked into the salon next door.

"Cut it," she told the stylist. "All of it. Chin length."

Hair dropped in dark curls around her feet. She watched in the mirror as a stranger emerged, sharper and lighter, with a neck and cheekbones and eyes that looked startled to be there.

Hello, she thought. There you are.

Chriss was in the driveway at six, leaning against the car. He looked up.

He stopped.

She stood very straight. "Don't."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You're about to say something unkind."

"Toria." He pushed off the car, slowly. "You look beautiful."

It was sincere. That was the worst part. It had no edge on it at all.

He held the door open. She got in, heart doing something stupid.

They drove, and the silence was nearly kind. At a red light she saw a golden retriever in the next car with its head out of the window, tongue flying, and she laughed before she could stop herself.

"What?" Chriss said.

"Nothing. My dog used to do that."

"You had a dog?"

"Sheba." The name sat in her mouth like something fragile. "She was mine from when I was eight. Then my parents argued, a bad one, and my father..." She swallowed. "He gave her away. To punish my mother. I came home from school and her bed was gone."

The light turned green. Chriss didn't move. A car behind them honked.

His knuckles were white on the wheel. "How old were you?"

"Eleven."

"That's a monstrous thing to do to a child."

He said it so fiercely that she turned to stare. His eyes were bright.

"I had a dog," he said at last. "Rocco. He slept on my feet until I was nineteen. When he died I didn't speak for three days." A pause. "I never told anyone that."

They looked at each other in the glow of the stopped traffic, two people who had accidentally said something true.

The house was enormous and loud and lit like a ship.

Music. Shouting. A football match on a wall-sized screen. A dozen men with beers in their hands turned as one when Chriss walked in with a woman beside him.

"Business thing," Toria said between her teeth.

"Technically…"

"Chriss."

"Oh, so this is her," said a man with a wicked grin, sliding in front of them. "Kelvin. And you must be the wife we've been told is a myth." He took her hand and kissed it, slowly, watching Chriss over her knuckles. "Gorgeous haircut."

"Thank you?"

"Kelvin," Chriss said, very quietly.

"What? I'm being welcoming."

Chriss's arm slid around her waist. "She's Toria. My wife. Say it properly."

Kelvin's grin widened with delight. A tall man behind him, Gabriel, laughed into his glass. "Oh, this is wonderful."

She cornered him in the hallway.

"You lied to me."

"I did."

"You manipulated me into coming. Eighteen months of keeping me away from your friends, and you couldn't even tell me the truth about tonight?"

"You'd have said no."

"Yes! Because you never asked!"

He didn't flinch. "I was never ashamed of you, Toria. I want you to know that. I was ashamed of me. I didn't want them to see what I'd made of us." He took a breath. "I wanted you to meet the people who matter to me. I was a coward about how."

Her anger wavered. It didn't die, but it wavered.

She stayed. She ate too much. Gabriel told her embarrassing stories about Chriss at twenty-two. Kelvin stopped flirting after the third time Chriss's hand found her back. At one point she looked up and found Chriss watching her from across the room, not hiding, not cold, and the men around him were elbowing each other and laughing.

She was having a good time. She hadn't expected that.

On the drive home the streets were wet and gold.

"I was proud," Chriss said into the dark. "To walk in with you. I didn't know that I would be."

She kept her eyes on the window.

"I should have taken you years ago. That's on me."

She said nothing. But her hand drifted to her bag, to the small, flat box hidden under her wallet.

It was nearly midnight when she locked herself in the bathroom and finally looked.

Two lines.

She slid down against the door and pressed both hands over her mouth.