Chapter 208 LATE

NIA

Mrs. Caroline left for the market at half past ten, which is the only reason I picked this hour.

You do not have this conversation in a kitchen with Mrs. Caroline in it. That woman can hear a secret being kept from two rooms away. She took her basket and her good coat and her opinions off to the village, and the moment the back door clicked shut behind her I sat down at the kitchen table, put my phone face down in front of me, and started counting on my fingers underneath it.

Not because I am bad at the math.

The math is insultingly simple. I did it right the first time, days ago, standing in the laundry with one of the Luna’s dresses in my hands. I did it again the second time and the fifth time, and every single time it has handed me back the same number, and I am not going to run it a sixth time under this table because numbers do not change their minds no matter how hard you squeeze your own fingers.

Six weeks. At the outside. Possibly less.

Across the kitchen, Amaris was making tea she did not need.

Eleven in the morning. Third cup. Except she was not making tea, not really. She was standing at the kettle with her back to the room, rearranging the tea tin and the sugar bowl and a spoon into a small defensive formation, because a woman standing at a kettle cannot be sat down and seen directly, and my best friend has spent three weeks turning the avoidance of chairs into a martial art. The kettle. The window. The long route to breakfast that she thinks nobody has noticed. I have watched her run every play in the book.

I was done watching.

“Amaris.”

“Tea?” Bright. Immediate. The spoon changed position in the formation.

“Sit down.”

She turned from the kettle with the expression already loaded, the one that comes with a script, and the script goes I’m fine, and I have listened to that script every morning for three weeks while she pushed eggs around a plate and called the circles eating.

I pointed at the chair across from me.

Her eyes went to the chair. Then to my face. And whatever she found in my face told her the script was not running today, because her shoulders came down half an inch, and she set the mug on the counter with a small click of surrender, and she crossed the kitchen and sat.

I turned my phone over and slid it across the table. Calendar open.

Then I shut my mouth and waited.

That is the part people get wrong with Amaris. You cannot talk her into a landing. She has spent her whole life being talked at by people who wanted things from her, and the talking just makes her funnier and further away. What you do is put the ground in front of her and hold still. So I held still, and I watched her study that little grid of dates, and I watched the precise second she stopped being in the kitchen with me and arrived in the conversation she has been outrunning since the coffee first turned on her.

Her eyes stopped moving across the screen.

“When was your last cycle, Luna.”

I kept my voice level. Not soft. Level. Soft would have scared her out of the room.

She stared at the calendar.

She lifted her eyes to me.

And the color went out of her face all at once. Not a fading. A light switched off. One second she was Amaris with a joke loading behind her teeth, and the next she was white to the lips, and her hands, which had been lying flat on the table, curled slowly inward until the knuckles stood up like a ridgeline.

Everything in me wanted to grab those hands.

I sat on the wanting. You let her have the landing first. Grab her too early and she will turn the whole morning into a performance of being fine for your benefit, complete with jokes, and I would rather eat glass than watch her perform fine at me across this table.

“Okay,” I offered, even and quiet.

“I have been stressed.”

“Yes.”

“The body does things under sustained stress.”

“It does.”

“I have not been sleeping properly.” The words started coming faster now, bricks going into a wall as quick as she could lift them. “And I have been off my food, you have personally witnessed the egg situation, you have commentary on the egg situation, and the stress has been significant and ongoing, there was a siege, Nia, an actual siege, and a vote, and a banishment, and the body responds to that kind of sustained pressure in ways that can look exactly like.”

The wall ran out of bricks.

The sentence just stopped, right at the edge of the word, and she stood at that edge with her mouth still open and did not say it and did not step back from it either.

I waited.

The kettle clicked itself off behind her, forgotten. Out the window one of the yard boys wheeled a barrow across the gravel, whistling off key, and the world went on being ordinary at us through the glass, rude as always.

Amaris pulled the phone closer with one finger.

She read the calendar again, properly this time, and I watched her run her own count behind her eyes, the count I already knew she had done, in the shower, at the window, mid signature on some grain letter, because this woman has never once needed my math. She has been carrying her own answer folded up small for days. All I did this morning was make her take it out and open it on the table.

Then, very quietly, without lifting her eyes from the screen:

“How long.”

“Six weeks at the outside,” I answered. “Possibly less.”

The kitchen went very quiet.

She stared at the table. I stared at her. My own hands had gone still in my lap, all the counting finished, and I did one last piece of arithmetic in the privacy of my own skull, the piece I have been refusing to say even to myself, because six weeks is a wide window. Six weeks is wide enough to hold a fireplace, and a window, and a full moon, and I love her, so I folded that arithmetic up small and put it away where I keep the things that are not the problem for this hour. This hour had enough.

Amaris stood.

The chair scraped back. She flattened both hands on the table and pushed herself upright, and when she spoke, her voice had been swept clean of every joke she owns, down to the bare boards.

“I need to go to the pharmacy in the village.”

I was already up. Already reaching for the keys on the hook by the door, already pulling my coat off the peg.

“I will drive.”