Two pink lines.
I picked up the test. I held it under the fluorescent light. The lines were clear, unambiguous, a result that left no room for the theory I'd been living inside for three weeks. I set it on the edge of the sink and stared at it, and for a moment, the room was very quiet.
I went back downstairs. I took two more tests from the ER supply room and a bottle of water from the staff room. I went back to the staff bathroom, guzzled water, and took them both.
They were all the same.
I sat on the closed toilet lid with three positive tests on the edge of the sink, my hands on my knees, and the shift ending in forty minutes. The fluorescent light buzzed. The lock held. Somewhere on the other side of the door, the L&D floor wasrunning as it always ran—monitors beeping, voices in the hall, the steady machinery of women bringing children into the world—and I was sitting in the bathroom with the proof that I was about to become one of them.
CHAPTER 6
Audrey
The parking lot at Hartsdale General was empty at six in the morning—a few overnight cars, a nurse's aide crossing to the far row with her keys out, the sky above the tree line going from black to the thin blue-gray that meant the sun was coming and didn't care whether I was ready for it.
I sat in my car with the engine off and three pregnancy tests in the chest pocket of my scrubs. I'd been sitting here for four minutes, deciding what to do next. Go home. Go to bed. Wake up later and pretend the staff bathroom hadn't happened.
I couldn't go home.
Going home meant sitting on my couch with nobody in the next room, and the silence in that apartment was going to eat me alive tonight.
I turned the key. I pulled out of the lot.
I was driving to Astrid's before I'd made a decision. I didn't know what I was going to say.
Astrid was the only person in my life who had never required me to perform. Not once, in years of friendship, had she asked me to be the version of myself the room needed. She took the version that showed up. She had taken the crying version, the angry version, and the version that showed up at her door withwine and a mouth full of complaints about a man she didn't name, and she had never once made me explain why I was there before she let me in.
I needed that. I needed to hand this to someone who would hold it without asking me to be okay first.
Easton's truck wasn't in the driveway. I noticed this as I pulled in and parked behind Astrid's car. The house was quiet. The kitchen window was dark. For one second, I sat in the driveway and thought about turning around, going home, dealing with this alone because alone was how I dealt with everything.
I got out of the car, walked up the porch steps, and knocked three times.
The porch light came on. Footsteps inside, the soft shuffle of a woman in socks on hardwood. The door opened.
Astrid was in a T-shirt and sleep shorts. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She had the look of a woman who'd been up long enough to make coffee but not long enough to drink it, and when she saw my face, the sleep left hers.
I didn't say anything.
I stepped through the door and put both arms around her neck.
"Audrey."
I couldn't answer. I'd been holding it through a twelve-hour shift, through Mrs. Okafor's labor, the nausea, and Lin's joke at the nurses' station, and the second Astrid's arms came around my back, the holding stopped working. My body shook against her shoulder. The shaking that came before crying, when the thing you'd been carrying was too heavy to set down gently, and your hands were going to tremble on the way.
Moose came down the hall. He sat at our feet and pressed his shoulder against the back of my knee, warm and solid.
"Audrey, what's wrong?"
I pulled back. I could feel the wet along my lower lashes. I reached into my chest pocket and pulled out one of the tests. I held it out.
Astrid took it.
She looked at it. She looked at my face. I looked at the floor, because looking at her while she looked at the test was more than I could handle.
"Audrey. How long have you known?"
"An hour. I took it in the staff bathroom at the end of the shift. I took two more. They're all the same."
