The thought arrived complete, for the first time. A crib was going to go somewhere. The second bedroom—the one I used asa home office, the one with the desk, bookcase, and reading chair—was going to become a room with a purpose I hadn’t chosen.
I started the list. Prenatal appointment. Vitamins. Insurance paperwork. The desk would have to go. The bookcase could stay if I moved it to the wall by the window. I'd need a crib, a changing table, and a small enough dresser for the closet. My income was mine. My savings were mine. I would figure this out by making a plan and executing it.
I walked to the bathroom to change.
The robe was on the back of the door. The silk one, cream-colored, the one I tied at my waist every morning I was home. I'd been wearing it the morning Duke sat on the edge of my bed, and I told him it couldn't be a thing. I'd tied it at my waist, sat across from him, and delivered the speech I'd built in the bathroom mirror. He’d said okay, and he’d looked at me, and I'd felt the small disappointed thing in my chest that had no right to be there.
I thought about it now. I stood in the bathroom doorway and looked at the robe and felt everything I'd been building for the last hour—the list, the logistics, the competence—come apart. Duke was the man I'd agreed to forget, and I'd not forgotten him, and I was carrying his child.
I sat down on the bathroom floor.
The tile was cold under my legs. I pulled my knees up, put my arms around them, and cried. I was scared. I was twenty-eight and pregnant by a man I'd slept with once and agreed never to see again. The life I'd built was about to change in a way I couldn't control.
I'd spent my whole adult life making sure I never ended up in a position where someone else's choice could reshape mine. None of it mattered now. A pregnancy was not a choice someone else had made. It was something my own body was doing, and my body didn't care about the architecture.
I wanted to call him.
I wanted to pick up my phone and hear his voice and tell him. I wanted the man who had read me at the table under the string lights, who had caught my elbow on the porch steps, who had said my real name against my temple in the dark. I wanted him here. On this bathroom floor. Sitting beside me.
I wasn’t going to call him. The pregnancy was mine. The decision was mine. When I told Duke—if I told Duke—it would be information, not an ask. I wouldn’t hand him the power to stay or leave and then wait to see which one he chose.
The crying slowed. I sat on the tile with my back against the tub until my breathing was steady and my face felt like my face again.
I was going to do this. Alone, if I had to.
I got up. I changed. I lay down on the couch, pulled the blanket over my shoulders, and closed my eyes.
I slept through the rest of the day.
"Sit," she said. "It's almost done."
The kitchen on Birch Hill smelled like eggs and herbs. The radio was on low, tuned to the station that played standards. My mother was at the stove in the apron she wore for cooking.
I sat and poured myself coffee from the pot on the counter. The smell hit me wrong—a faint roll of nausea that I swallowed down before it reached my face. Six weeks. The coffee aversion had started four days ago. I took a sip anyway, because not drinking coffee at my mother's table on a Sunday was a tell that I wasn’t ready to give.
"How's work?" She slid the eggs onto a plate, brought it to the counter, and sat across from me.
"Busy. We're short-staffed this month. Lin went part-time."
She ate neatly, fork set down between bites. The blue plates were out. The linen napkins were folded in thirds.
"Will they replace her?"
"Eventually. In the meantime, I'm picking up the extra shifts."
"You work too much, Audrey."
"I work the right amount, Mom."
She gave me a look that started at my hair and ended at my hands.
"How’sThe Yarn Room?" I asked.
She told me about the knit-along, the woman from Garrison who drove forty minutes for a hand-dyed merino, the cable stitch Marcie had talked her into teaching. I listened. I asked follow-ups. Underneath the listening, I was running the script.
I knew what she would say when she found out. She wouldn’t yell. She wouldn’t cry, or not right away. She would go still. Then she would ask questions. Measured, careful questions.Who is the father? How far along? Have you thought about what this means?And underneath every question, the one she would never ask out loud:Are you going to end up like me?
She would hear "firefighter" and "coach's son" and map those words against the one she had been carrying since my father left—a charming man from outside the Callahan world who couldn't carry the weight of it and left.
