22. Millie
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MILLIE
I step inside. Cold. Dark.
I don't turn the lights on. I just stand in the doorway with my coat still on and my keys still in my hand.
I don't know how long I'm there. A minute. Ten. The apartment is so quiet I can hear the refrigerator humming and the faint ticking of the clock in the kitchen and my own breathing, shallow and uneven.
Something soft brushes my ankle. Tofu. She winds between my legs, pressing her body against me. When I look down, she looks up, purring, and I slide down the wall.
Tofu climbs into my lap and curls up. I put my hand on her, and I just sit.
I'm hollow. Like someone reached inside me and scooped everything out and left the shell. I should be angry. I should be hurt. And I am. But right now it's just this. Empty. Gutted.
My phone buzzes. His text.
Joseph
Mills. Please. Just tell me you made it home safe.
Even now. He's worried about me. Giving me space because he knows I need it. And somehow that makes it worse because how do I hate someone who's still taking care of me while I'm sitting on his hallway floor falling apart?
I lean my head back against the door.
There was too much tonight. Vivienne is his sister.
Vivienne. My first and closest friend in the orchestra betrayed me, asked her brother to call Rios.
And he listened. The same man who looked me in the eye in his office and told me to keep working, that maybe next season was mine.
He already knew. He'd changed the result before he ever said it.
My head won't stop spinning. Everything I thought was real wasn't.
I type back.
Millie
I'm home.
Nothing else.
I try to separate the timeline. I keep going over it.
He made the call before we met. Before the dating app.
Before the restaurant and the jokes and the sidewalk kiss and the night I pulled him toward me because I wanted to feel like someone other than the girl who lost. He didn't know I existed.
He didn't know Millie Martin was the other candidate.
He just knew his sister was falling apart, and he did what he always does. He fixed it.
But fixing Vivienne meant breaking me.
If he hadn't made that call, I would have gotten First Chair. I wouldn't have opened that app at one in the morning sitting on my couch in the dark. I wouldn't have swiped right on a man with a smile that fills his whole face and gone to that restaurant and I wouldn't have gone back to his place.
If he hadn't made that call, I wouldn't have fallen down those stairs because I wouldn't have been distracted by overhearing people pity me for losing something I never should have lost. I wouldn't have ended up in his ER with three broken ribs and a pregnancy test that came back positive.
I wouldn't be sitting in his apartment right now pregnant with his baby.
Everything that happened, every piece of it, traces back to that phone call.
And I can't figure out if that means I should be grateful or devastated. Because both feel true.
I sit there. I don't know how long. The hallway stays dark and I don't move.
Tofu meows, then again, louder. She butts her head against my arm. She's hungry, of course she is. The world could be ending and Tofu would still need dinner at her scheduled time.
I force myself up. My legs are stiff. I walk to the kitchen and scoop food into her bowl on autopilot and she dives in like nothing happened. Must be nice, being a cat. No betrayal. No broken trust. Just food and sleep and the occasional pigeon to judge from a windowsill.
The baby moves. A small shift. I put my hand on my stomach and feel him press against my palm, and something knots up inside me.
Because this baby exists because of what Joseph did.
If he hadn't made the call, I never would have opened that app.
I never would have met him. No boy growing inside me right now with his DNA and mine woven together.
My son is a consequence of my worst loss. And I love him more than I've loved anything, while also being furious about what brought him into existence.
After feeding Tofu, I wash my face. I change into pajamas. I go to bed.
His bed. Our bed. Yesterday it was warm and exactly the right size for two.
Tonight it's enormous, every space he should be filling is just cold sheet.
I pull the covers up and lie on my side.
His pillow still smells like him, and I turn away from it because I can't, but I can feel where he should be behind me, an absence shaped exactly like him.
The next morning, I'm sitting at the kitchen counter with a cup of tea I made but haven't touched.
I slept maybe two hours. The baby was restless, and so was I.
Every time I started to drift off, my brain served up another angle of what happened, another frame of Joseph's white face in that doorway, another replay of Vivienne's voice saying the words that rearranged everything.
My phone buzzes. Joseph. Another text.
Joseph
Mills. I know you need space, and I'm giving you that. I just need you to know that I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. When you're ready to talk, I'm here. I'll wait as long as you need.
I read it. I don't respond.
I text Adeena instead.
Millie
Can we meet? I need to talk.
She's there within the hour. We meet at the same cafe where I told her about the pregnancy. Same table by the window. She takes one look at my face and sits down without a word.
I sign everything. Slowly. My hands are heavy. The dinner. Meeting his parents. How warm it felt. Like belonging. And then Vivienne walking in. The shock of realizing who she was. The awkward dinner and what I overheard in the hallway.
When I get to the part about the phone call, my hands start shaking, and I have to stop and press them flat against the table until they're steady enough to continue.
Adeena's face goes through about six different expressions during the telling. When I finish, she's leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed.
"Okay," she says. "That's a lot."
I sign: Yeah.
"How are you feeling?"
I sign: Like someone pulled the rug out from under me, and I'm still falling.
She nods, doesn't rush to fill the space. That's the lawyer in her, taking in all the information before she responds.
"Here's what I think. And you might not like all of it."
I nod for her to go on.
"What he did was wrong. Full stop. He called the conductor and interfered with a fair process, and you lost something you earned. That's not okay. You have every right to be angry about that. One hundred percent."
I nod.
"But." She uncrosses her arms and leans forward, holding my eyes.
"He did it for his sister. Who has a serious mental illness.
Who was in the middle of a crisis." She waits until I'm looking at her.
"From everything you've told me about Joseph, this isn't a man who manipulates systems for fun.
This is a man who was terrified his sister was going into a spiral and he did the only thing he could think of. "
I sign: I know.
"I'm not defending him, Millie. I'm just saying he had a reason."
She pauses, looking at me carefully.
"And here's the part that's going to be hard to hear.
" She reaches across the table and takes my hand.
"That thing about him, the part that made him call the conductor, that willingness to do anything for the people he loves, even if it costs him.
That's the same thing that made him stay when the pregnancy test came back positive.
The same thing that made him move you into his apartment.
" Her grip on my hand tightens. "That made him hold your hand in every exam room.
That made him get a whiteboard and learn your language. "
She leans closer.
"It's the same instinct, Millie. He protects the people he loves. It just happened to hurt you before you were one of them."
I stare at my tea. My throat is tight.
I sign: I don't know what to do. I want to be angry at him. At Vivienne. But somehow I'm not.
Adeena nods slowly. "You don't have to know anything yet, Millie. You said he gave you time and space. Use it. Think about it. Really think. For you. For the baby. You don't have to rush into any decision right now."
I nod.
"And whatever you decide," she says, "I'm here. Okay? Whatever it is. I'm here."
I sign: Thank you.
"Anytime." She reaches over and squeezes my hand. "Anytime."
I come back to an apartment that's still empty.
A small part of me somehow wished he'd be here.
That he'd ignore what he said and come home anyway.
And an even smaller part, one I don't want to look at too closely, misses him.
Already. It hasn't even been a full day yet and I miss the sound of him in the kitchen.
I miss the humming. I wonder if he slept. I wonder if he's okay.
I hate that I'm worried about him right now.
I stand in the kitchen. The whiteboard is on the counter. Some grocery list from earlier this week in his messy handwriting. Eggs. Milk. Ginger candies. A little doodle of a cat in the corner that I'm pretty sure is supposed to be Tofu.
I turn it face down.
I walk through the apartment. Everything is the same, and everything is different. The couch where we watched cooking shows. The counter where he kissed me for the first time since the first date. The hallway where he said goodnight and signed it, careful and slow, the way I taught him.
Every room in this apartment has a memory I don't know what to do with anymore.
I go to his bedroom. It still smells like him.
His watch is on the nightstand. A book he's been reading is face down on the dresser, spine cracked.
He reads multiple books at once. There are four of them stacked by the bed, each with a bookmark of its own, poking out at varied heights.
I used to tease him about it. I'd hold two up, and type pick one and he'd say, "I'm reading all of them.
Simultaneously. It's a skill" and I'd give him a look, and he'd laugh.
I lie down on his side. I press my face into his pillow, and my whole body relaxes before my brain can stop it. I blame the pregnancy. Hormones. That's all this is. My body is wired to seek comfort right now and his scent is just familiarity, just biology, it doesn't mean anything.
It means everything. I know it and I hate it.
The baby moves again. Stronger this time. A real kick, sharp and sudden, like he felt my frustration and responded to it. I press both hands to my belly.
I know, I think. I know. We're okay. We're going to be okay.
I don't know if I believe it. But I say it anyway, inside my head, because that's where all my words live, and some of them need to be heard even if I'm the only one listening.
Tofu jumps up and curls against my stomach. Her purr vibrates against my belly and she presses her face there like she can feel him, too. The three of us, lying in a bed that belongs to a man who isn't here. Who is probably awake right now at his parents' house, his mind on the same thing mine is.
Whether this can be fixed. Whether I want it to be.
I'm not sure.