35. Nina
NINA
The coffee started tasting wrong four days ago.
Not bad exactly, just different, like something in my body has quietly revised its opinion on the thing I’ve been drinking every morning for fifteen years without consultation.
I pour it down the sink on Tuesday and make tea instead, and Marta watches me do it with an expression I choose not to examine.
I’ve been tired in a way that sleep does not fix. Not the tiredness of the last eight months, the story and the faction and the nights I didn’t sleep properly. This is different, lower, sitting in my bones rather than behind my eyes.
I file a piece on Wednesday, it goes through cleanly, my editor replies in four minutes, and I sit back, drink my tea, and tell myself it’s residual stress.
I tell myself that on Thursday too.
On Friday morning, I open the cabinet under the bathroom sink and take out the test I bought three days ago and left there because buying it and using it are two different levels of commitment, and I was not ready for the second one.
I sit on the edge of the tub and look at the result for a long time, then I put the test in the cabinet, close the door, and go downstairs for breakfast.
Nikolai is at the table. He looks up when I come in, and I pour my tea, sit down, open the laptop, and we eat. Neither of us says anything out of the ordinary, and I think, good, this is fine, I am completely fine.
He pours me a second cup of tea without asking.
I look at the cup. I look at him. He’s already back behind the brief and has not looked up. I drink the tea, close the laptop, go back upstairs, and sit at my desk for twenty minutes without opening anything.
The first day I sit with it, I file a piece. Something I’ve been working on for two weeks. It goes through, and my editor loves it. I read his reply three times, and I think about what it means to have built something over ten years that doesn’t go away just because everything else has changed.
The work is still mine. That steadies me more than I expected.
The second day, I go to dinner, and Nikolai opens the Burgundy and pours two glasses and slides one to me. I look at it for a moment, and then I say I have a headache.
“Since when do you get headaches?” he asks.
“Since now,” I say. “People get headaches, Nikolai.”
He looks at me for one more second and then picks up his own glass, and we eat, and the dinner continues, and I push the wine aside and drink water.
That night I lie next to him, look at the ceiling, and turn the information over the way I turn everything over.
The work of it, not the feeling, the facts. What it means, what it changes, what it does not change. I have been in enough situations to know that the first forty-eight hours of any new information are not the time to make decisions about it.
You sit with it. You let it settle. You find out what it looks like when the shock of it has worn off, and only the reality remains.
The reality, when I look at it plainly, is this. I’m in this house. I’m staying in this house. Not because I have no choice, I know that now, but because I have made a choice and it is mine.
Whatever this is between us has been building since the church, and I stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around the time I kissed him for the first time in the dark, and the world did not end.
This is simply the next piece of information.
On the third morning, I come downstairs, and he’s already at the table with his coffee and the brief, and the morning is ordinary and gray outside the window, and I pour my tea and sit down, and I look at him across the table.
He looks up.
I put my cup down. “I’m pregnant,” I say.
The words land in the quiet of the kitchen, and I watch his face. Not the managed face, not the controlled surface he shows the world, the real one underneath it, and what it does in the two seconds after I say those words is the most unguarded I have ever seen him.
His eyes come to mine and stay there.
I’m too honest with myself to pretend I don’t want exactly this. His complete attention, his eyes on mine.
He reaches across the table and takes my hand.
That is all.
That is enough.