Page 44 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“I can’t…” I set my fork down. “Can’t eat. My stomach isn’t cooperating.”

“Toast?” she asks as she delivers my coffee.

But my stomach protests the mere thought. “I think I’ll skip breakfast, actually.

Lunch is the same story. Galina’s chicken soup, which I’ve dreamed about, smells like a swamp today. An old one. I eat four crackers and push the bowl around, and Galina watches from the doorway with no expression whatsoever.

By dinner I’ve stopped pretending. I take one look at the roast chicken and excuse myself, because everything smells. Smells surround me. I can’t escape them.

Outside. I need to go outside. The autumn garden has cold, clean air. That should do the trick.

But the garden ambushes me with wet leaves going to rot, the last roses doing their dying-heavy perfume thing, chrysanthemums that smell like pennies, all of it an assault. Every scent arrives in high definition, each with its own version of nausea. One lap and I’m back inside, breathing through my mouth like a woman escaping a candle store.

If I get to my room, at least I can control the smells.

I bolt for that heavenly space, but going down the hall, I catch a faint whiff of smoke. And it smells like a cure.

The fireplace in the study is lit, dry oak and char and warm stone, goes through me like a hand smoothing a wrinkled sheet. My stomach unclenches for the first time since the eggs.

I don’t question gift horses. I get my book, and I install myself in the leather chair by the fire, and for one hour I’m a Victorian invalid taking the cure, and it works. It works so well that I get comfortable. And comfortable is my doorway to snooping.

The study has cabinets, and one drawer is unlocked and shouldn’t be. Not if Maxim intended to keep secrets from me.

Inside are account books. Hand-kept, older than the company files I work in, and folders behind them. A small treasure trove.

Within ten minutes, I know things I would pay real money to not know. This is not a treasure. It’s a trap.

Shipping schedules for the West Coast ports matched to payments from companies whose names end in syllables I recognize from Mandy’s documentary. Kai. Gumi.

Wire transfers braided through Tokyo and Osaka and a bank in Vanuatu I assume at first is a typo. Cargo that is only ever called cargo, moving between his piers and theirs.

The photograph in the office wasn’t a souvenir. It was a board meeting. The Yakuza aren’t a rumor attached to my boss. They’re a column in his books.

I cannot keep ignoring this.

My curse, which once earned me employee of the month, now ruins my life. I recall what I read—almost all of it on the first try—vendor numbers from two years ago, Klaus’s calendar from last March, page forty-one of a PDF. My mind captures these images involuntarily, and there’s no erasing them. Ever. No matter how much I want to forget.

I sit back down by the fire, because I never wanted to know any of that, and if I keep going, I’ll learn more un-unlearnable things, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to know any of this.

Stupid curiosity.

Between the eggs and the garden and that drawer, I need a nap. I climb the stairs on legs made of wet rope, promising myself sleep.

I’m reaching to wash my face when I see it. On the bathroom counter, square in the middle, where it cannot be missed, is a white pharmacy bag.

No note. No name. Galina doesn’t leave notes. But I have no doubt that it’s from her. Or what’s inside.

I unfold the paper bag’s crisply folded top and wonder. She saw me all day. She knows what it could be. I do, too. No other symptoms, given my age, and oh God, did she hear us? I don’t even know where her bedroom is here. She may have, and if so⁠—

Yep. The bag has a pregnancy test.

I do the thing the box says. Pee on the stick. Wait three minutes. I sit on the cold edge of the tub, and I do not think about the drawers in the study, or Irina, or a man who sent his child away to protect them from himself.

I think about nothing. I grip onto nothing in my head with both hands, as hard as I can. I need nothing. I need this to be nothing.

And then, it’s not nothing. Two lines. Clear as can be.

Positive.