Page 170 of No Good Fight

Mostly, I think I need to hear myself say it.

“I’m pregnant.”

Mrs. Vance doesn’t gasp or start firing questions at me. Her hand simply stops halfway to her tea, and she watches me with an expression I can’t read for several seconds.

Then she puts the cup down.

“How long have you known?”

“Yesterday.”

“And Ryder?”

I shake my head.

Her gaze flicks toward the back of the house before returning to me. I brace for the lecture, but she only reaches across the table and lays her hand over mine.

“Are you happy?”

The question gets me harder than anything else could have.

I look down at our hands. Hers is smaller than I remember from all the times she grabbed mine in hallways or shoved something useful into it because she decided I needed protecting.

“Yeah.” My voice comes out rougher than I want. “I’m scared, but I’m happy. So fuckin’ happy.”

Her fingers tighten.

“Those things can live together. And when it comes to our babies, they really often do.”

I nod because speaking again might embarrass me, and I can already feel the tears in my eyes.

Mrs. Vance lets the quiet stay there until I’m the one who breaks it.

“I have a doctor’s appointment next week. I took four tests, though, so unless I somehow bought the world’s most coordinated batch of defective pregnancy tests, I think we can trust them.”

Her mouth twitches, and I know that look well enough to recognize the joke forming before she gets a chance to make it.

I swipe beneath one eye with the side of my finger and point at her with the other hand. “Don’t.”

Mrs. Vance lifts her brows, far too innocent for a woman who once tried to take on Preston with a cane. “I didn’t say a word.”

“You were going to.”

“I was thinking.” She reaches for her tea, taking her time with the sip while she studies me over the rim. “That baby probably has your stubbornness already.”

A laugh catches in my throat before I can stop it. “It is approximately the size of a seed. I don’t think it has developed a personality yet.”

Mrs. Vance puts her cup back on the table and gives me the same dismissive look she uses whenever I say something she considers irrelevant. “Plenty of time.”

That answer is vague enough to make me suspicious. I narrow my eyes at her while she brushes a crumb from the newspaper and straightens the edge of the page like we haven’t just discovered she’s apparently assigning personality traits to an embryo.

“Plenty of time for what?”

She leans back in her chair and folds both hands over the handle of her cane, her expression becoming far more thoughtful than the conversation reasonably requires. I know immediately I’m not going to like whatever she comes up with.

“I’ll need to start planning.”

The dread arrives before she explains herself.