17. Celine
CELINE
The coffee smells wrong.
It has smelled wrong for four mornings now. I stand at the counter the way I always stand, mug in hand, and my body rejects it before it reaches my mouth. I pour it down the drain. I wash the mug. I tell myself I’m tired.
I have been telling myself I’m tired for two weeks.
I’m at my desk when it hits again, the nausea, arriving without warning from somewhere low in my stomach.
I press my fingers to my lips. Breathe through my nose.
Wait for it to pass. It passes. I go back to the schedule on my screen, and I don’t think about it because I have seventeen other things requiring my attention, and my body has been through enough in the last two months that I owe it the benefit of the doubt.
The next morning, I’m in the shower when I stop.
Just stop. Standing under the water with my hand against the tile. Counting something I have not let myself count until right now. The weeks. The last time. The weeks again.
I stand there for a long time.
I don’t go to the pharmacy near the building.
I walk three blocks north and two east, to a drugstore I have never used, the same way I walked away from the building before calling Joanna, the same way I have moved every time I needed to do something this man’s world could not see. I pay cash. I put it in my bag under my notebook.
The coffee shop on the next street has a bathroom at the back. I order something I won’t drink. I sit at the table by the door, and I wait long enough to stop my hands from doing what they are doing. Then I go to the bathroom. Lock the door. Open my bag.
I look at the result for a long time.
Long enough that someone knocks on the door outside. I say one moment. I wrap it in tissue. Put it in my bag. Wash my hands. Look at myself in the mirror above the sink.
My face looks the way it looks. I don’t know what I expected.
I go back to work.
Thursday evening, there’s a council dinner.
I didn’t plan to attend it carrying this information alone, but the invitation was sent two weeks ago, and canceling now would require an explanation I do not have.
So I put on the dress, and I get in the car, and I sit beside Zane at the table, and I smile at Alexei and answer Viktor’s questions about the amendment’s progress, and I do all of it with the same composure I’ve been building in these rooms for months.
Nobody can tell.
I’ve been doing it my whole life, but tonight the gap between what is on my face and what is happening inside my chest is wider than it has ever been.
Halfway through the main course, Zane says something low and close to my ear about a man across the table whose name I immediately forget, and I nod and laugh at the right moment, and he looks at me once, briefly, the way he looks at things he’s deciding about, and then he looks away.
On the way home, I sit in the back of the car and I look at the city moving past the window and I think about the small fact sitting in my bag and what it means for every exit I’ve been mapping and every wall I’ve been circling and every version of my life I’ve been trying to build back toward.
Friday, I almost tell him.
It happens in the kitchen, the ordinary kind of almost, the kind where your mouth opens.
The words line up, and then something closes before they get out.
He’s reading something at the counter, coffee in hand, and I’m behind him, reaching for a glass, and I stand there for three full seconds with his back to me, thinking this is the moment.
Then his phone rings and he answers it, and the moment folds back into the day, and I close my mouth and get my glass and go back to my room.
I sit on the edge of my bed afterward, and I think about why I closed my mouth. Not fear, not exactly. More that I’m not ready to hand it to him yet, not while I’m still holding all of it myself, not while the shape of it is still something I’m just beginning to understand.
I need one more day. Just one.
Lena calls on Friday evening.
“Priya made me walk the canal again this morning,” she says, before I’ve said hello properly. “Four degrees. She handed me a scarf that smelled like her grandmother and said the cold builds character.”
“Does it?”
“I have no idea. I’ve started looking forward to it, though, which probably says something worrying about my mental state.” She laughs, and I lie back against my pillow and let it do what it always does.
She tells me about the restaurant Priya found, a dessert she’s ordered three times now, and a nurse who brings extra blankets without being asked. She sounds like herself. Actually herself, not the careful version she uses when she doesn’t want me to worry.
Then she stops mid-sentence. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“Celine.”
“I’m tired, Lena.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I can hear her breathing. She’s deciding whether to push. She has always known when to push and when to wait. I have never been more grateful for the waiting than I am right now.
“Okay,” she says.
We talk for another twenty minutes. She tells me about a chess match she lost badly to a man at the facility who apparently has no mercy whatsoever, and I laugh for real, the first real laugh I’ve had since earlier this week in the shower.
When we hang up, I put the phone to my chest, look at the ceiling, and think about my sister in Zurich, who looked at my face on a screen and understood immediately that something was happening, and loved me enough to let me keep it.
I think about telling her properly, soon, when I have words for it beyond the bare fact of it.
I think about telling him instead.
I think about his face. I can’t predict it.
I know this man now in a way I couldn’t have imagined the day I signed thirty-one pages without reading them.
I know the controlled version and the kitchen-at-midnight version and the version that stood in my doorway on a rainy night and didn’t move when I told him to leave.
I know what he looks like when he’s managing a room and what he looks like when he has forgotten to.
I don’t know what he looks like when the world shifts under him.
I am about to find out.
Saturday morning, early.
Before the suit. Before Roman. Before the day requires anything from either of us. I wash my face, look at myself in the mirror the same way I looked at myself in the coffee shop bathroom, and I go down the corridor.
The walk is shorter than it feels. His light is on under the door, the way it always is before the rest of the building wakes up.
I stand outside for a moment, my hand not yet raised to knock, listening to the quiet of the apartment around me, the kitchen where we have had every important conversation sitting silent behind me.
Then I knock twice.
“Come in,” he says.
He’s at his desk. Dark shirt, the city still gray behind him, the morning not yet decided about itself. He looks up. He looks at my face. He puts down what he’s reading before I have crossed the room.
I sit in the chair across from his desk.
I spent two days deciding how to say this. Every careful version I built came apart when I sat down in front of him.
“I’m pregnant,” I say.
The office holds it.
I watch his face.
I can’t read it.