Chapter 15 #2
His phone buzzes on the nightstand with a text from Platon. Nikita reads it over my shoulder, and I feel the shift in him, the operator coming back online.
“Lazar,” he says. “Platon has movement to walk me through.”
“Go.” I push at his chest before he can offer to stay, because he will, and I don’t want him choosing me over the thing that keeps us both breathing. “Go plan your war. I’m going to lie here and feel superior about it.”
He kisses me once more slowly, then gets up and dresses in the dark.
He stops at the door as he always does now, like leaving me costs him something.
Then he’s gone down the stairs to talk about the man who wants him dead, and I’m alone in the bed that is apparently ours, feeling too much and refusing to name any of it.
The nausea hits about ninety seconds later.
I make it to the bathroom before it wins, and I’m still on the cold tile with my forehead against the edge of the tub when the door opens and Maren enters. She doesn’t knock.
“I heard you through the floor.” She sits down on the tile next to me, back against the tub, close but not touching. “That’s the third time this week I’ve heard it. And at least three weeks in a row. I’ve been counting, because you clearly aren’t.”
“It’s stress. It’s the schedule. I haven’t been eating right.”
“Piper.” She says my name in the tone she uses when she’s done letting me run a game on her.
“You don’t drink coffee anymore. You gagged at the salmon Tuesday, and you love salmon.
You’ve been asleep by nine like a toddler, which isn’t you—you have never once in your life gone to sleep before the job was done.
” She’s quiet for a second. “When was your last period?”
The tile is very cold. “Nine weeks.” It sounds worse when I say it aloud.
She purses her lips and doesn’t seem surprised. “It’s time to stop living in denial. You need to get a test—”
“I took a test.” The admission surprises me on the way out.
“Weeks ago, right after the range, when you first started counting at me. It came back negative, and I let myself stop counting, because the test said I was allowed to.” I press my forehead harder against the tub.
“Then the tired and the food and all of it didn’t stop, so I told myself it was the schedule and the travel and never eating right, because those were all true too, and a true reason is the easiest thing in the world to hide behind. You taught me that one.”
I don’t say the rest, which is the loudest thing I could have said.
“Okay,” Maren says softly. “Okay.”
“It could be stress. Stress does that.”
“It could be.” She doesn’t believe it and she’s not going to insult me by pretending. “There’s a way to find out that doesn’t involve us guessing at each other on a bathroom floor at eleven at night.”
Mila, who has been staying in the guest wing since Palm Beach, comes in wearing a cardigan over pajamas, her medical bag in one hand. I understand that Maren texted her before she even sat down, that the two of them have been quietly watching me for weeks and waiting for me to stop lying.
Mila doesn’t say anything about it. She sets a small boxed test on the counter without ceremony and looks at me with blunt kindness.
“I’m not here as anyone’s spy. I haven’t told him.
I won’t. This is yours to know first and yours to tell.
” She sets a second thing beside the test, a folded paper with numbers on it.
“Whatever it says, these are the questions worth asking, and I’ll answer any of them whenever you want.
Not tonight if you don’t want them tonight. ”
Then she’s gone, because Mila knows exactly when to leave space for a private conversation, and it’s just Maren and me, with a box on the counter.
I take the test while Maren waits outside.
When it’s done, I set it face-down on the edge of the sink and sit back down on the tile.
Maren returns to sit with me, and we wait like we’ve waited out a hundred things together, shoulder to shoulder, not talking, while the longest three minutes of my life go by.
“Whatever it is,” Maren says, “you’re not doing it alone. I want to say that before we look, so you know I said it before I knew, not because of what it says.”
I turn it over.
Two lines. Clear as a signature I’d know anywhere.
I let it settle. Maren’s arm comes around me. She doesn’t say congratulations, and she doesn’t say I’m sorry, because she doesn’t know yet which one this is, and neither do I.
I’m not afraid, which surprises me, because I’ve built my whole life on being afraid of exactly the right things at exactly the right time. It’s something with no clear name, terror and wonder folded into the same blur of emotion. It’s a good thing and a dangerous thing that refuse to separate.
Down the stairs, behind a closed door, the man who did this with me is planning a war against the man who wants him dead.
I think about the certificate I forged to get into this house, and the marriage that was supposed to be the biggest lie I was carrying.
I think about how much has stacked up on top of it since.
I look at the two lines and understand the fake marriage is now the safest secret in this house, the one that can’t get anyone killed.
I’m holding the other one alone on a bathroom floor with the only person left who’s known me since before I learned to lie. This one is far more explosive.
“Don’t tell him yet,” I say.
“I won’t.” Maren pulls me in closer. “You’re going to have to tell him soon, though, Pipes. That’s not a secret you get to keep.”
“I know.” I brush away a stray tear. “I just want some time where it’s only the good thing. Before it has to be the dangerous one too.”