Chapter 9 Lines
SERAFINA
By the time I can leave the bathroom, my mother has come to find me. She brings water and waits while I drink a little, then takes the empty glass downstairs. I follow her after changing my shirt. In the kitchen, she moves the coffee away before I can ask and sets out vegetables for soup.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I glance at the screen without picking it up.
Rafael.
His name sits there, a rectangle of light demanding attention. I watch it until the call goes to voicemail, then turn back to the onions I'm supposed to be chopping.
"You don't have to answer." My mother pauses with a carrot half peeled. "But you can, if you want to. I'll give you the room."
"I don't want to." I peel the dry outer skin from the onion and leave it beside the board. "Not yet. Maybe not at all."
She finishes peeling the carrot and takes up her knife. I stay beside her, although I'm not much help. It's easier than going upstairs to sit alone beside my phone.
The phone buzzes again. Another call. I let it ring.
Yesterday I told a lawyer to start divorce proceedings.
I haven't told Rafael yet. He's going to find out soon enough, when the paperwork reaches him or when someone who knows mentions it.
But I'm not ready to have that conversation.
I'm not ready to hear whatever excuse he's come up with, whatever explanation he thinks will make the past few months disappear.
The onion blurs in front of me. I blink hard and blame it on the fumes.
"Serafina." My mother catches the phone before its vibration carries it off the edge of the counter. "Do you want to put it away?"
It's buzzing again. I wipe my hands on a towel and pick it up, ready to decline the call, but this time it's not Rafael's name on the screen. It's a voicemail notification. Two of them now, from the calls I ignored.
I could listen. He asked to talk on Friday, and I said not now. I still haven't decided what I want to say, but I'm tired of preparing for his voice every time the phone lights up.
My thumb hovers over the screen.
What would he even say? That he's sorry? That he doesn't understand why I left? That Marisol told him I came to the office and he only remembers pieces, as if that explains anything, as if partial amnesia erases the months of absence that came before it?
Before I can close the screen, a message arrives: Please let me know when we can talk. I don't know what he said in the voicemails. Rehearsing answers to arguments he hasn't made is exhausting me. I leave them unheard, mute the phone, and put it in my pocket.
"Leave those if the smell bothers you." My mother makes room for the onions on her board. "You've had enough of a morning."
I give her the onions and fetch the bowls from the cupboard. I can manage that.
By early afternoon, I've run out of ways to avoid thinking about what happened in the workroom.
I'm sitting on my bed with my notebook open, trying to focus on the jasmine formula Fiorella asked about, but my mind keeps circling back to the bathroom floor. The sudden nausea. The way my body rejected a scent I've worked with for months.
Stress, I told myself. The divorce. The sleepless nights. But stress doesn't usually hit me that way. I've been stressed before, plenty of times, and my stomach has never turned on me like that.
I flip back through the notebook without really seeing the pages. There's something I'm not letting myself think about. Something that has been bothering me since I left the bathroom.
When was my last period?
I take out my phone and open the calendar. The date I marked for my next period has already passed. I've been late before, but not usually this late. How did I manage not to notice? I put the phone back in my pocket without closing the calendar.
My hand goes to my stomach without my permission, pressing flat against the soft fabric of my shirt. There's nothing to feel. No sign. Just the ordinary flatness of my own body, familiar and unremarkable.
But the nausea. The way my own blend made me sick this morning. The exhaustion that I blamed on grief and stress and sleepless nights.
No. I can't think about this. Not now, not when everything else is already falling apart.
I close the notebook and leave it on the bed, swinging my legs over the edge. I need to move. I need to do something, anything, that isn't sitting here calculating dates and terrifying myself with possibilities I'm not ready to face.
My mother is still in the kitchen when I come downstairs, the soup simmering on the stove and filling the house with the smell of vegetables and herbs. She looks up as I grab my keys from the hook by the door.
"I need to run an errand." I don't give her time to ask what kind. "I'll be back in an hour or two."
"Take your time." She stirs the soup without looking at me. "I'll be here."
The drive into town takes twenty minutes. At the turning for the square, I almost keep going toward the supply shop instead. By the time I park outside the pharmacy, my hands are shaking on the steering wheel.
This is ridiculous. I'm a grown woman. Buying a pregnancy test shouldn't feel like walking into a firing squad.
But it does. Because if the test is positive, everything changes.
Everything I've been planning, the divorce, the move to France, the clean break and fresh start, all of it becomes infinitely more complicated.
A baby ties me to Rafael forever, whether I want to be tied to him or not.
I haven't even managed a conversation with him about leaving. How would I tell him this?
If it's negative, I can stop trying to work out what I would say. That's reason enough to go inside.
I get out of the car before I can change my mind again.
The pharmacy is quiet this time of day, a few elderly customers browsing the vitamin aisle and a bored teenager restocking shelves near the back. I walk past the cosmetics and the cold medicine and the rows of bandages until I find what I'm looking for.
The tests are on a low shelf. I choose one and turn it over to read the back, although I barely take in the words. At the register, I set it down with the name facing me. The woman behind the counter still has to scan it. Apparently embarrassment isn't making me clever.
The woman rings up the box without comment and slides it into a bag. She doesn't search my face for a reaction. I'm grateful for her indifference.
"Card?" She turns the payment terminal toward me, leaving the bag beside it. I tap my card against the reader and put it back in my wallet.
The transaction takes less than a minute. The bag goes into my purse, hidden beneath my wallet. No one would know what's inside unless they looked.
I'm not ready to look yet.
I drive home with the bag still in my purse, the test sealed and waiting and impossible to ignore. My mother is on the phone when I come in, talking to someone about an order for the estate, so I slip upstairs without stopping to explain where I've been.
The bag goes into my nightstand drawer, under a scarf I never wear and a book I started reading months ago and never finished. I close the drawer before I can read the box again.
I lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling, my hand pressed flat against my stomach.
What am I supposed to do with a baby?
I haven't thought about children in months. Haven't let myself think about them, because thinking about them meant thinking about Rafael, about the future we were supposed to build together, about all the promises we made that he kept breaking without ever quite admitting they were broken.
We talked about children when the idea belonged to both of us.
I remember how easy those conversations felt.
We could disagree about something as small as a name and never doubt that we wanted the same future.
I haven't let myself return to those conversations since I left. I don't know where to put them now.
And now someday might be happening anyway, whether I'm ready or not.
I roll onto my side and pull a pillow against my chest, curling around it like it might protect me from whatever comes next.
The test is in the drawer. I should take it. I should know.
But knowing means deciding, and I'm not ready to decide anything. Not today. Not yet.
I close my eyes and try to sleep.
***
The sound of tires on gravel wakes me.
I sit up too fast, my head swimming from the sudden movement. The light coming through the window has shifted, gone golden and low. I must have slept for hours.
Outside, a car door slams. Then voices, too distant to make out words but close enough to hear the tension in them.
My father's voice. And someone else.
I'm at the window before I consciously decide to move, my fingers on the curtain, my heart pounding in my throat.
Rafael is standing at the gate.
The gate is closed, the heavy iron bars separating him from my father on the inside. Rafael's car is parked on the road behind him. He has left enough room for another car to pass, but he's standing directly in front of the gate.
He's wearing a dark shirt, his sleeves rolled back, and he keeps turning toward the house between my father's replies. Part of me wants to run downstairs and demand to know what he thinks he's doing here. Part of me wants to crawl back into bed and pretend I never saw him.
Neither part wins. I just stand at the window and watch.
My father is saying something, his posture rigid and protective. Rafael responds with his hands spread in front of him, palms up. I know that gesture. He's asking to be heard.
But I can't hear what they're saying, and I can't stand not knowing.
I grab a sweater from the chair and pull it on as I head downstairs, my feet moving faster than my thoughts. At the front door, I stop with my hand on the handle. I can still go upstairs. Then I hear my father say my name, and I want to speak for myself. I push through anyway.