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“I’m not sorry. I love you, Anni. Don’t think for a second that I have some fucked-up feeling of anger that they haven’t touched you too—in that way.” She adds that at the end, knowing that they’ve touched me plenty.
But her words don’t soothe the guilt; they give me a sense of relief for a whole other reason. One I haven’t shared with her yet.
“I love you too.”
If we really aren’t getting out of here, I might never get the opportunity to share this. “I have to tell you something.”
“What is it?” she asks when the silence stretches too long.
“I think I may be pregnant.”
“What?!” Old Hanna rises to the surface for a few moments, her voice close to the normal pitch it had before we were brought to this place.
She gets up to sit next to me, which is pointless since it’s pitch-black in here and we can’t see each other.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, since I obviously didn’t have a test handy, but I missed my period.”
“And you’ve been nauseous and sick recently. I thought it was this whole situation.”
“It’s probably part of it. But I’m sore, my breasts feel different, and they ache, my nipples extra sensitive. I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining it.”
“But if you’re not…”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah…”
“This is not a great advertisement for the brand that made your IUD. How do you feel about it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t exactly have time to adjust to the idea. With everything that’s been happening, I lost track of time. But it’s been in the back of my mind for a few days, when I realized that I should have had my period by now.”
“Wow… I wonder what Ronan would think about this. And Finn…” Her voice trails of with longing as she talks about the man she’s been falling for. “He would be an uncle. And I’m Auntie Hanna. Huh. I love the sound of that.”
For a moment, it seems that she’s drifting into a dream… an illusion of what our lives could be. And probably never will.
“I told him. Before the assholes broke in when I was on the phone with him. I couldn’t… I couldn’t disappear without telling him. It felt wrong for him to never know it if I die. Maybe it was selfish of me too. Maybe out of desperation, I thought that the revelation might make him search harder…” God, this is terrible to admit.
“You thought you weren’t enough?!”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re blind if you haven’t seen how that man looks at you, Anni.”
“Like Finnigan looks at you?”
I smile, even if she can’t see it in this darkness. She sighs, and I wish I could soothe her. But here… nothing can.
“I miss him,” she continues. “He crawled under my skin so deep… He’s younger than me too. I have no idea how I’ve allowed this.”
“Allow? Nothing allows Finnigan Hennessey anything. The moment he laid eyes on you, you had no way out.”
“I really didn’t. He’s honest. Wears his heart on his sleeve. So open to show it all to me, his heart, his soul, his dirty as fuck mind. It’s refreshing meeting a man like that.”
Those beautiful thoughts end in a muffled cry. I know what she’s thinking—she’ll never see him again. I know because that’s exactly what I’m thinking about Ronan. My parents too… they’ll never know what happened to me if I die.
I don’t doubt that Ronan’s searching tirelessly for us. I truly do not doubt it. They put their asses on the line for us. But that doesn’t mean they’ll find us.
