22. Harper
HARPER
I’ve been tired for almost two weeks before I let myself actually notice it.
Not the ordinary tired of a full shift and a six-year-old’s bedtime routine, something heavier, the kind that has me falling asleep on the couch before nine some nights, waking up more exhausted than I went to bed.
I blame it on everything else. The visitation schedule. The man at the school Viktor still won’t fully explain. The strain of loving someone who keeps half of himself locked behind a door he won’t open for me yet, no matter how many times I’ve decided not to push.
There’s plenty to be exhausted about without needing a better explanation. That’s what I keep telling myself, at least, every time I catch myself dozing off during Ginger’s homework or forgetting halfway through a sentence what I was actually saying.
Then the smell of coffee starts turning my stomach, which has never happened to me in my entire life, and I stand in the kitchen one morning staring at a pot I usually can’t function without, nausea rising fast enough that I have to grip the counter.
“You okay?” Viktor asks, watching me from the doorway.
“Fine. Just tired.”
He studies me a beat longer than the answer requires, and for a second I think he’s going to push, the way I’ve been wanting him to push about whatever he’s hiding.
He doesn’t. He just kisses my temple and heads out for the day, and I stand there another minute, waiting for the nausea to pass, counting backward in my head without meaning to.
Two weeks of exhaustion. The coffee thing, new as of yesterday. And somewhere in the counting, a slower, colder realization surfaces that I’ve been avoiding since it first tried to.
I haven’t had a period since before the wedding.
I tell myself it’s stress. It’s been an unbelievably stressful few months, and stress does things to a body, skips things, delays things, and I’ve read enough to know that’s not actually a rare occurrence for someone under this much pressure.
I tell myself that all morning, through Ginger’s drop off, through the drive to a pharmacy I don’t even work near, telling myself the whole way there that I’m just being thorough, not worried, just thorough.
The pharmacy aisle with the tests is smaller than I remember from the one time in college I stood in a similar aisle, terrified for entirely different reasons.
I grab a box without really looking at the brand, pay in cash for no reason I can articulate, even to myself, and drive home with it sitting in my bag like something that might detonate if I look at it the wrong way.
I catch myself checking the rearview mirror twice on the drive, half-convinced someone might see the bag and know, though there’s nobody in the car but me and nothing about a paper bag that could possibly reveal what’s inside it.
The house is quiet, Ginger at school for another four hours, Viktor at the club until evening, nobody around to witness whatever I’m about to find out about myself.
I read the instructions twice before I actually take the test, stalling, and then I do it fast, the way you rip off a bandage, because slow never made anything easier in my experience.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub afterward, timer running on my phone, staring at my own hands instead of the test on the counter, because I’m not ready to look yet, not for the full two minutes, not even for one.
When the timer finally goes off, I make myself pick it up before I can talk myself out of it.
Two lines.
I stare at it long enough that the bathroom light starts to feel too bright, too clinical, like I’m standing in a hospital instead of my own home. I read the box instructions again, like maybe I misunderstood something simple enough that a six-year-old could interpret it correctly the first time.
Nope. Two lines means pregnant.
I’m pregnant.
My legs go a little unsteady, and I sit back down on the edge of the tub, test still in my hand, my mind doing that thing where it refuses to produce a single coherent thought, just static, just the two lines repeating themselves over and over like they might change if I look away and look back.
A baby. An actual baby, growing right now, in the middle of everything else currently happening in my life, a marriage that started as a legal transaction and somehow became the realest thing I’ve ever built, a man who’s kept some part of himself locked away from me for weeks now, a threat I still don’t understand hovering somewhere at the edges of everything.
I don’t know how to feel. That’s the truest thing I can land on, sitting there with a positive test in my hand. Not happy, not devastated, just entirely, completely overwhelmed by the size of it, too big to process in one sitting.
I think about Viktor, about how he’s going to take this.
He never asked for a family beyond Ginger, never signed up for anything beyond a temporary arrangement that solved a custody problem and somehow, slowly, turned into an actual marriage neither of us planned on wanting.
A baby wasn’t part of any version of the plan, not mine, and certainly not his.
I try to picture his face when I tell him, and I can’t land on a single version that feels certain.
Joy, maybe. Panic, maybe. Some complicated mixture of both that he won’t let me see clearly until he’s decided how he wants to feel about it, the same measured control he brings to everything else lately.
I think about what he’s already carrying right now, whatever’s behind that locked door, the security that’s quietly doubled around this house, the man at the school he still won’t explain.
Adding this on top of whatever’s already weighing on him feels almost cruel, dropping one more enormous thing onto a man who’s already stretched thinner than he’s willing to admit to me.
I decide, sitting on the edge of the tub with the test still warm from my hand, that I’m not telling him tonight.
Not because I want to keep it from him. Because I want one day, just one, to sit with this news myself before I have to manage his reaction to it too, whatever that reaction turns out to be.
I wrap the test in tissue and bury it at the bottom of the bathroom trash, underneath enough other things that nobody would think to look, and I splash water on my face until the woman in the mirror looks slightly less shell-shocked than she did five minutes ago.
By the time I pick Ginger up from school, I’ve mostly composed myself, enough that she doesn’t ask why I seem quieter than usual, enough that I can nod along to her detailed account of Theo’s opinions on today’s lunch options without my voice giving anything away.
That night, after dinner, after bedtime, Viktor finds me on the porch, same spot as always, and settles in beside me without a word, comfortable in the quiet we’ve built between us over these last months.
“You’ve been quiet tonight,” he says eventually.
“Long day.”
“You keep saying that lately.”
“Because it keeps being true.” I lean into his shoulder, and he lets me, arm coming around me automatically now, easy in a way that still catches me off guard sometimes, how naturally we’ve learned each other’s shapes. “I’m okay. Just tired.”
“You’d tell me if it were something else.”
“I would.” The lie comes easier than I expect it to, and I hate a little how easily it comes, given how much I’ve resented him for the same thing these last few weeks. “I’m fine, Viktor. Just tired.”