Chapter 209 TEST

AMARIS

The box has been sitting on the edge of the bathtub for four minutes.

I know it has been four minutes because I have been watching the little clock on the shelf instead of the box, which tells you everything about my current strategic position. The clock ticks. The box sits. The grout between the floor tiles runs in long grey lines that I have now studied closely enough to testify about under oath. There is a hairline crack in the third tile from the door. I never noticed it before today. I could draw it from memory now.

I am aware that not looking at the box is not a strategy.

I am aware the result finished developing three minutes ago and became permanent, that it is the result whether I witness it or not, that the two little windows on that stick do not require an audience to mean what they mean. I am a reasonably intelligent woman. I am aware of all of this.

I am still not looking at it.

Nia drove me to the village. She kept the engine running outside the pharmacy and she did not come in, and on the way there she did not ask one single question, and on the way back she did not ask one either. She turned the radio to something with no words in it and drove with both hands on the wheel, and when we got back she took my coat and told me she would put the kettle on, and that was the entire conversation. I want to tell her something about that when I come out of this bathroom. I want to tell her that the not asking was the exact right call and that I noticed it and that I am grateful. I have the whole speech assembled.

I am going to deliver it as soon as I look at the box.

I look at the box.

Two lines.

I look away. The crack in the third tile. The clock. The towel hanging crooked on its rail, which I straightened twice while waiting and which has already gone crooked again, because nothing in my life stays where I put it.

I look back.

Still two lines.

They are very pink and very confident and completely indifferent to my viewing schedule. They have been sitting there being true this whole time, patient as furniture, while I studied grout.

I set the test down on the edge of the bathtub, very gently, the way you set down something that might go off, and I fold my hands in my lap and sit on the closed toilet lid and regard the two lines from a distance of about two feet, and my entire vocabulary, the vocabulary I have used my whole life as armor and weapon and currency, produces exactly one word.

Well.

Well.

The last six weeks unspool behind my eyes in order. The study and the fire and the rug. The window and the rain and the wall at my back. The full moon coming silver through the curtains with both of them in my bed. I run the sequence forward. I run it backward. And the sequence delivers me to the same place from every direction, which is this: three different men, one of me, and no way to know. Not a probability. Not a lean. Not even a respectable guess. Nothing.

Three men.

One bathtub.

Two lines.

The moon goddess does not just hate me. Hatred is casual. What the moon goddess has is a personal grudge and a detailed file, updated regularly, cross referenced, with my name on the cover in her best handwriting.

I press both hands over my face and just sit inside my own palms for a while, breathing the dark in there.

Because I am going to have to tell them.

Not today. But eventually there is going to be a room, and Corvin is going to be in it, and Ryker is going to be in it, and Rowan is going to be in it, and I am going to have to stand in front of all three of them and produce a sentence that begins with I am pregnant and then simply stops, because the sentence has no second half. No useful follow-up.

No clarifying appendix. I am going to have to say the half sentence and then continue physically existing in that room while three of the most dangerous men on this continent process it in their three completely different ways, and Ryker will go still, and Rowan will start calculating, and Corvin’s jaw will do the thing, and I will be standing there holding nothing but the half sentence.

That is a future problem. I file it, formally, in the future.

The present problem announces itself when I take my hands off my face and discover that I am no longer on the toilet lid. I am on the floor. I have no memory of the journey. At some point in the last few minutes my body executed a controlled descent down the side of the bath panel and settled me on the tiles like luggage, and the cold of the floor is coming up through my dress, and the crooked towel is now above my eye line, and this is where I live now, apparently. On the bathroom floor. With no operating procedure.

I look at the two lines again from my new address.

A baby.

There is a baby.

The words go through me differently down here, lower and slower, and my hand moves before I decide anything and lays itself flat on my stomach. Not because anything is different yet. Nothing is different yet. It is six weeks at the outside, possibly less, there is nothing under my palm but my own skin and this morning’s reluctant tea. I know that. My hand does not care what I know. My hand needed a post and it chose one and it is not leaving.

And sitting there on the cold tile with my palm on my stomach, I think about my mother.

A woman I never met. A woman whose face I have assembled entirely out of one photograph and my own guesswork. She found out she was carrying me somewhere, once, some room I will never see, and she did not have a pharmacy test with its confident pink lines, and she did not have a bathroom with a lock, and she did not have a Nia in the kitchen putting the kettle on with the radio still going. She had whatever she had, which by every account was not much, and she carried me anyway, inside a pack that made its opinions known, and she did not get to find out how I turned out.

I am sorry, I tell her, silently, down through my hand. I am sorry I never got to know you. I am going to do better than the circumstances you were handed. I do not know how yet. But the child under this hand is going to grow up watched and wanted, and nobody in any yard is ever going to howl at it for sport.

The two lines do not move.

The clock on the shelf keeps ticking. Somewhere beyond the door the kettle has boiled, because I can hear the small domestic sounds of Nia not knocking, Nia deliberately and audibly not knocking, giving me the whole floor plan of her patience.

I stay where I am, back against the bath panel, hand on my stomach, and I give myself the next five minutes. Five minutes where I do not have to be a Luna or a wife or a mate or a half sentence in a room full of dangerous men. Five minutes where I am just a woman on a bathroom floor, terrified and, underneath the terror, in a place I am not ready to look at directly yet, something that feels alarmingly like glad.

Five minutes.

Then I will get up.