Page 33 of Until You

“I know. I recognized it.”

A beat.

“She used to make it on Sundays,” he says. “After church. The whole house would smell like it.” He’s looking at the glass in his hands, not at me, and his voice has that late-night quality, a little lower, less guarded, like the darkness gives him permission to say things the daylight wouldn’t allow. “I haven’t had it in years.”

My chest aches.

“I can make it again,” I hear myself say. “If you want.”

He looks at me then. In the dark kitchen. With the moonlight coming through the window above the sink and the dripping faucet keeping time.

He looks at me the way he looked at me that first night. Like he’s trying to figure out all my secrets.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I’d like that.”

We stand there for one more moment.

Then I say, “Goodnight, Oliver.”

And he says, “Goodnight, Cora.”

And I walk back to my room and close the door and press my back against it and put both hands on my stomach and breathe.

One week, I tell myself.

One week and then the truth. And then he and the rest of his family will likely hate me.

But standing in the dark, I am not thinking about the truth. I’m thinking about the way he said I’d like that. Three words. Simple. Quiet. The kind of thing that doesn’t mean anything and means everything.

I’m thinking about the way he washes his plate every night.

I’m thinking about pot roast on Sundays, a baby in a hospital photo, and two people who loved each other for fifty years and counting.

I’m thinking that temporary used to be the safest word I knew, and now it just sounds like the saddest.

I press my forehead against the door.

“One week,” I whisper.

The tiny life inside my uterus offers no comment.

But I swear—I swear—I feel something flutter. Light and quick, like wings. Like the smallest possible answer to a question I haven’t figured out how to ask yet.

What if I stayed? What if he let me stay?

I push off the door, climb into bed, pull the covers up, and close my eyes. I shut my mind out so I don’t try and answer my own question.

Some doors you don’t open until you’re ready to walk through them.

And I’m not ready yet.

But I’m closer than I was yesterday.

And that terrifies me more than anything.