Page 111

It’s a bad night for it. I’ve had three days of relative calm, the nausea finally settling into something manageable instead of the low-grade constant it was for the first month, and I’d let myself get careless. Walked into the kitchen without checking first, the way I’ve trained myself to check every room before entering it lately — is there a candle burning, is someone reheating fish, is the coffee maker running. Small precautions I’ve built into my life so quietly nobody’s noticed the pattern of them, only the results.

Tonight I forgot. Tonight the cinnamon hits me broadside and my stomach turns and my eyes water, and I stand there gripping the edge of the counter with my whole body doing the thing it’s been doing in secret for six weeks, except this time there’s an audience.

Wren looks up from the couch. “You okay?”

“Fine.” Automatic. The word costs nothing anymore, which is its own kind of terrifying — how easily I can say it now, how little it takes to produce, how the lie has worn a groove so smooth I barely register saying it.

Except I’m not fine, and I’ve been not-fine for six weeks now, and something about standing in my own kitchen gripping the counter with my eyes watering from a candle that never used to bother me breaks something loose that I’ve been holding shut since the pharmacy in Northfield.

I don’t decide to tell them. That’s the part I’ll think about later — that there was no plan, no careful staging, none of the case-building I usually do before I say anything that matters. But underneath the candle, underneath the nausea, there’s something else that’s been sitting in my chest since Boston and hasn’t let go since — Laney’s voice at the door, hand on my arm, telling me whatever you’re carrying, honey, you don’t have to carry all of it alone. I’ve been turning that sentence over for two days now, the way you turn over a stone that’s been sitting somewhere just out of reach, and standing here in my own kitchen with the counter cold under my hands, it finally lands where it needed to land.

A woman who’s known me for two hours saw enough to say it. Three women who’ve known me for years are sitting right here, and I still haven’t let any of them see it at all.

I just open my mouth to say fine again, louder, more convincing, and instead what comes out is a sound I don’t recognize as mine, something cracked and involuntary, and then I’m crying. Not the composed kind. Not the shower-floor-in-Charleston kind, where even falling apart had a container around it.

Just crying. Ugly and sudden and completely out of my control, my whole body shaking with it, six weeks of managed silence finally finding the one door it’s been looking for.

“Margo.” Sloane’s off the couch before I’ve even registered her moving, across the kitchen, hands on my shoulders. “Hey. Hey, look at me. What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” I’m still crying, which makes the lie land even worse than usual. “I’m fine, I don’t know why I’m —”

“You’re not fine.” Wren, quieter, coming to stand on my other side. “You haven’t been fine in weeks. We’ve all noticed. We just didn’t want to push.”

June turns off the stove — she’d been making something, I register distantly, the specific domestic detail arriving sideways the way details do when your whole nervous system is somewhere else — and comes to stand in front of me, blocking the rest of the kitchen like she’s creating a smaller, safer room within the room.

“Talk to us,” she says. Simple. Direct. June doesn’t do a lot of hand-wringing; she just gets to the point, which right now is exactly what I need and also exactly what terrifies me.

I open my mouth. Close it. The words are right there — I’ve been carrying them for six weeks, turning them over so many times they should be smooth by now, worn down like a stone in a pocket — and I still can’t get them out clean.

“I —” I stop. Try again. “I need to tell you something and I need you to not — I need a second.”

“Take all the time you need,” Sloane says. Her hand doesn’t leave my shoulder.

I take a breath. I look at all three of them — Sloane’s face open and worried, Wren’s steady and waiting, June’s already bracing for something big, the specific readiness of a person who manages chaos by meeting it head-on.

“I’m pregnant.”

The word lands in the kitchen and just sits there, enormous and finally real in a way it’s never fully been even to me, not in the bathroom with the test in my hand, not in the pharmacy parking lot, not once in six weeks of carrying it silently through practices and games and a trip to Boston.

Nobody says anything for a second. The candle burns. The stove ticks as it cools.

Then Sloane pulls me into her, both arms around me, and I go, collapsing into her the way I haven’t let myself collapse into anyone in weeks — not managed, not composed, just falling apart completely in my best friend’s arms in the kitchen of the house that’s been home for almost three years.

“Okay,” Sloane says, after a while, still holding me. “Okay. You’re pregnant. How far along?”

“Six weeks. Give or take.” My voice comes out wrecked. “Charleston.”

“Theo’s,” Wren says. Not a question.

“Theo’s.” I pull back enough to wipe my face, and June’s already there with a paper towel, pressing it into my hand without a word, which is such a June thing to do — practical love, delivered before you even ask for it.

“Does he know?” June asks.

“No.” The word costs something to say out loud. “Nobody knows. I found out three weeks before the Conference Semifinal. I’ve been—” I stop. Start again. “I’ve been managing it. Hiding it. Timing water breaks around the nausea, blaming a stomach bug, telling everyone it’s Nationals stress.”

“That’s why you’ve been so tired,” Sloane says. Quiet. Not accusing — just piecing it together, the way you do when six weeks of small, strange things suddenly resolve into one large obvious thing.

“That’s why you skipped breakfast for like a month,” June adds, working through her own version of the same pattern. “I thought that was just stress eating in reverse.”