Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Maya
Ibuy the test at a pharmacy six blocks from the café because I cannot bear the thought of walking into the one near the apartment and running into someone who knows me.
The cashier does not look up when she scans it. The box disappears into a paper bag with a receipt and a packet of cough drops I do not need but buy anyway because standing at the register with only a pregnancy test feels too much like an announcement.
Outside, the cold has sharpened.
I stand beneath the awning for nearly a minute, staring at the bag in my hand while rain gathers at the curb.
There are a hundred reasons this could be nothing.
Stress. Travel. A body that has spent too long running on adrenaline and coffee.
A month blurred at the edges because Leon died, Stefano disappeared, and I have been building a life for two children who have already lost too much.
Then I remember the cinnamon rolls.
The sudden nausea.
The way my jeans have felt tighter for three days.
My hand clutches the paper bag.
“Jesus.”
No one answers.
By the time I get home, Alex’s car is parked outside. I can hear Erin before I reach the door, her voice escalating in outrage over something unfair, which could mean anything from homework to the existence of peas.
“I am not eating that,” she says as I step inside.
“You have not even looked at it,” Alex replies.
“I can smell it.”
“That is how food works.”
Heath sits at the table with his math worksheet spread in front of him, pencil held too tightly in one hand. He looks up when I enter. The glance is quick, but it lasts long enough for him to notice the way I close the front door behind me.
Alex turns from the stove. “You look pale.”
“I had coffee with Victor.”
“That is not generally a medical emergency.”
“Depends on the coffee.”
Erin narrows her eyes at me. “You’re being weird.”
“I am always weird.”
“No,” Heath says. “Different weird.”
The accuracy of it almost makes me laugh.
Instead, I tuck the paper bag behind my hip. “I am going to lie down for a minute. Alex, please make sure no one burns the apartment down.”
Erin lifts her spoon. “That happened one time.”
“Twice,” Heath says.
“It was the toaster’s fault.”
I escape before she can build a defense.
My bedroom door clicks shut behind me.
For a long time, I stand in the center of the room without moving.
The apartment is quiet here, softened by the muffled sound of the twins arguing in the kitchen and Alex telling them both to lower their voices.
On the dresser sits a framed photograph Erin made us take last week.
The three of us are on the couch, Heath trying not to smile while Erin leans on my side hard enough to push me sideways.
I look at it.
Then at the paper bag.
Then back at the photograph.
This is not how I imagined my life.
That thought is useless. My life has never cared what I imagined.
I take the test into the bathroom and lock the door.
The instructions are printed in three languages. I read them twice, then a third time because my hands are shaking too badly to trust my eyes. The process takes less than a minute. Waiting takes forever.
I sit on the closed toilet lid with the test balanced on the counter and count the tiles on the floor.
One. Two. Three. Four.
By the time I reach twenty, my breath has gone thin.
I look up.
Two lines.
For a moment, I do not understand what I am seeing.
The second line is pale, but it is there.
Clear enough that my body knows before my mind catches up.
The room seems to tilt. I clutch the edge of the counter, waiting for panic to arrive, because I do not know how to do this alone and I do not know what this means for the children, for Stefano, or for the life I have been trying to hold together.
First comes a memory of Alice.
Not the end. Not Leon. Not the photographs I have tried to forget.
Alice at twenty-two, standing barefoot in our mother’s kitchen with a pregnancy test in her hand and tears running down her face because she was scared and happy and already trying to convince everyone else that she could handle it.
She had laughed when I jokingly told her she was going to be a terrible mother.
“I’ll be better than you,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know everything.”
She had believed it.
For a second, I have to press both hands over my mouth to keep the sound inside.
I am not Alice.
I am not going to become her.
The words feel cruel the moment I think them, as though loving her means inheriting each and every fear she died with. Still fear does not become fate because I refuse to name it, and I need to believe that if I am going to carry this child and keep my children safe.
I pick up the test again.
Two lines.
A baby.
Stefano’s baby.
The thought is so enormous because it changes everything: what I owe this baby, what I owe the twins, and what I am willing to risk to keep them all safe. It isn't merely a baby. It is Stefano’s child, and the size of that truth makes my hands go numb.
A knock sounds at the door.
“Maya?” Erin’s voice comes through the wood. “Are you okay?”
I wipe my face quickly. “Yeah.”
“You sound weird.”
“I am fine.”
The silence outside the door lasts two seconds.
Then Heath says, “She is lying.”
“Thank you, Heath.”
“You’re welcome.”
I almost smile.
Almost.
I unlock the door before they can decide to break it down. Erin stands there with Mr. Buttons clutched beneath one arm. Heath is behind her, watching me with the same cautious focus he gives any adult who says they are okay too quickly. Alex hangs back near the hall, his expression careful.
“You look sick,” Erin says.
“I am not sick.”
“Then why are you crying?”
My hand goes to my cheek. Damp.
Damn it.
“I was thinking,” I say.
“That makes you cry?”
“Sometimes.”
She steps into the bathroom and wraps both arms around my waist without asking. I freeze for half a second, then hold her back. Heath stays near the doorway, pretending he does not want to come closer.
I look at him over Erin’s head.
“You okay?” he asks.
The question is awkward in his mouth. Earnest enough to hurt.
“No,” I say.
His eyes widen slightly.
I force myself to keep going. “But I will be.”
He absorbs that. Children always do. They remember the difference between adults who say everything is fine and adults who tell the truth without making them carry it.
Erin pulls back. “Can we help?”
The answer rises immediately.
No. Not with this. Not yet. You are children. You have already had enough of adult problems put in your hands.
But I look at both of them and remember what it felt like to be shut outside Alice’s fear until there was nothing left to do but regret it.
“You can sit with me,” I say.
Erin nods as if I have given her an assignment. Heath takes the edge of the counter beside me, close but not touching.
For a few minutes, no one speaks.
Then Erin says, “Do you think Stefano is okay?”
My chest constricts.
“He is hard to kill,” I say.
“That is not what I asked.”
The words sound too much like Heath for them to have come from anyone else.
I look at him.
He is staring at the floor.
Before I can answer, he says, “He hugged us before Boston.”
The room goes still.
“What?”
Heath’s shoulders rise. “The night you left. He came in after you were asleep.”
Erin nods quickly. “He hugged me too. He said he had to go do something bad so we could be safe.”
My stomach drops.
“What exactly did he say?”
Erin squints, trying to remember. “He said… he said, ‘Your aunt will come back. Omar will keep you safe. And nobody will ever take you anywhere again’.”
Heath looks up at me then. “He said he promised.”
Something fractures inside my heart.
Not because it excuses him. It does not.
Not because it makes what he did to Leon easier to forgive.
It does not. But because I can see him in that room now, standing over two children who barely trusted him, making promises he knew he intended to keep with blood if necessary.
Then he left me in Boston because he thought I deserved the freedom to hate him without him standing there asking for mercy.
The idiot.
The cruel, impossible idiot.
Alex shifts in the doorway. “Maybe you should sit down.”
I am already sitting. I look at the test on the counter.
Two lines.
Stefano’s child. My future. A decision neither of us gets to make alone.
“I need to call Victor,” I say. “I need to find Stefano.”