Callie
I made pancakes, which should tell you everything about my mental state.
I am not a pancake mom. I am a granola-bar-over-the-sink mom, a we're-calling-string-cheese-protein mom.
But it was the Friday of a four-day weekend, I'd been awake since five replaying three men hissing at each other behind a cardboard snowdrift, and somewhere around six I decided the only way out was through batter.
By the time Tessa and Vaughn knocked, I had enough pancakes to feed a youth group and a kitchen that looked like a flour bomb had gone off.
"Oh no," Tessa said the second I opened the door. She looked at my face, then at the leaning tower of pancakes behind me. "You stress-cooked. Vaughn, she stress-cooked."
"Mr. Vaughn." Oliver appeared in the hallway, fully dressed despite the day off, because Oliver does not recognize holidays as a reason for anarchy. He eyed the box. "That's the one with the seagulls. The seagulls are nearly identical. It took us four hours last time."
"Took us four hours because your aunt kept hiding pieces in her bra."
"It's called creating demand," Tessa said.
"It's called cheating," Oliver said, and led Vaughn off to the dining room like a tiny supervisor escorting a contractor. I heard Vaughn say, "Walk me through your seagull strategy," and my heart did a stupid little squeeze, because a man built like a wanted poster adored my son.
Tessa waited four seconds until they were out of earshot. Then she planted herself on a kitchen stool, chin in her hands, and stared at me.
"What?" I said.
"You know what."
"I genuinely don't."
"Calliope." She said my full name like a cocked gun.
"You texted me at six a.m. inviting me over for pancakes, well aware I have been sitting on a theory for weeks.
You slapped your hand over my mouth at rehearsal.
I almost bit you. Confirm it right now or I start guessing loudly, in this kitchen, where your child can hear me. "
So I told her, letting the words fall out in one long unpunctuated avalanche while flipping a pancake that did not need flipping. Tessa didn't say one word the whole time, which has never once happened in twenty years. When I finished she stood up, sat back down, and smacked the counter.
"I KNEW IT. I knew it the second you started glaring at every mom within ten feet of those three.
The dads ARE the lake guys. The cupcake gods.
" She stopped. Her eyes went huge. "Wait.
Wait wait wait. You've been living a reverse harem novel and you let me lend you BOOKS.
You let me say things like get back out there, maybe try an app.
An APP. You were out here collecting single fathers like infinity stones and you let me suggest an APP. "
"In my defense-"
"There is no defense! This is the proudest day of my life. I have to sit down."
"You're sitting down."
"Then I have to lie down!"
And for a minute it was great. The kitchen smelled like butter, Tessa was cackle-snorting, I was shushing her, and from the dining room Oliver informed Vaughn that "Aunt Tessa just needs to laugh sometimes," and Vaughn rumbled back, "She really does, buddy."
Then Tessa caught the smile sliding off my face, and stopped laughing.
"What's the rest of it?"
I put down the spatula.
"It's over. It has to be." I told her about going to find them at rehearsal, and what I heard instead.
Who's crowding her. Who's hogging her. Who saw her first. "A lifetime of friendship, Tess, and they're snapping at each other behind a snowdrift like I'm the last good donut in the teachers' lounge.
They told me it was handled. Both of them, separately, looked me in the eye and said it was handled.
It's not. I'm the crack running through the best thing those men have, and I won't be that.
I'd rather lose all three of them than be the reason they lose each other. "
"Honey. You deserve-"
"Don't."
"I will absolutely 'don't.' You deserve to be fought over a little, you giant idiot. You've spent years deserving things and refusing all of them on principle."
"That's not the worst part." And because apparently, I was telling her everything today, I told her the worst part.
The prop hallway. The cologne. His hand on my waist and his face coming at mine, and my hands on his stupid straining pecs, and the shove, and what I said, and how quiet his voice went after.
I have seen Tessa angry. I once watched her make a grown man cry at a DMV. I had never seen this. She went completely still, and her voice came out flat and terrifying.
"He put his hands on you."
"Tessa-"
"He put his hands on you in our school and then he threatened your job." She was already reaching for her phone. "We're documenting everything. Today. Dates, times, every gross comment, all of it. And then we are going to-"
And that was when my stomach staged its coup.
It came out of nowhere, same as the prop hallway, except there was no plywood castle to grip, just the counter and a tower of pancakes whose smell went, in one second, from cozy and comforting to crime against humanity.
I made it to the sink. I didn't throw up exactly, but I definitely did an undignified swallow and when I straightened, Tessa was watching me with an expression I didn't like at all.
"That's the second time," I said, running the tap. "It happened after Darren too. It's stress. My body's staging a little walkout. It'll pass."
Tessa said nothing.
"It's stress, Tessa."
"Callie." Careful now, which scared me more than the fury had. "When was your last period?"
The kitchen went very quiet. In the dining room Oliver announced a corner piece and Vaughn said "way to go little dude," and the tap ran over my hand, and I stood there doing math.
Bad math. Math where I kept losing my place and starting over, which is how I do all math, but this equation had a specifically dizzying quality like vertigo, because the retreat was the retreat and then we got back and there was the house and the car and the restaurant and somewhere in all of that there should have been a… there should have been at least one-
"I'm irregular," I said. "I've always been irregular. My cycle runs on county fair scheduling."
"Callie."
"And I've been stressed! Stress delays it. That's science."
"Callie."
"I can't be," I whispered, and my hand had already migrated to my stomach without permission, a betrayal from yet another part of my body. "Tess. I have a son and a mortgage and a principal who wants me fired or worse, and the three- the three possible- oh my god, there are three possible."
"Okay." Tessa came around the counter and took both my wet hands, and her eyes were shining with something that wasn't only worry.
"Breathe, twin. We don't know anything. It's a maybe, and maybes can wait until after pancakes.
But I'm telling you something now, because I was going to wait and I'm done waiting.
" A breath. "I'm pregnant. Sixteen weeks.
That's how I knew the puke face. I've been making that face since August."
I stared at her. The kitchen did another slow spin.
"You're-"
"Yeah."
"And I might be-"
"Maybe."
"We could be pregnant at the same time," I said, and then I was crying and laughing at once, which is my body's most reliable setting, and she was too, and we stood in my flour-bombed kitchen gripping each other like two women who'd spotted the same lifeboat.
Somewhere in the middle of that hug, with her heartbeat going against my ear and a maybe-baby I couldn't look at yet, the truth I loved to bury finally cracked out of me.
"Tess, I'm just so tired of pretending that I'm fine.
" My voice came out small. "Everybody's so used to me being like everything is A-OK.
I've gotten so good at masking that I'm staying afloat, but the truth is I feel like I'm sinking.
I just, I don't know how to ask for help and half the time I feel like I don't deserve it. "
"You just did, dummy." She squeezed harder. "That's what this is. That's what I'm for."
And of course, that was when my phone rang.
I knew before I looked.
Tessa's grip tightened.
"Don't answer it."
"It's my boss."
"It's a four-day weekend!"
I answered because I knew I couldn't ignore it forever. "This is Callie."
"Miss Morgan." His voice was smooth the way things are smooth right before you slip on them. "I need you to come into the school this morning. There's a matter we need to address before the break goes further."
"Today's a holiday, Principal Beauford. I have my son."
"It won't take long." He took a meaningful pause and then chuckled. "I'd hate for this to become a bigger conversation than it needs to be. Shall we say an hour?"
He hung up before I could answer.
Tessa was already shaking her head. "No. You're not going alone. Vaughn drives you, he waits right outside the office, he's enormous, it's a whole vibe-"
"And that tells Darren exactly what he wants to know, that he scared me." I set the phone down so she couldn't watch my hand shake. "I shoved him into a stack of plywood and told him to choke on it. I'm not following that up with a bodyguard. He gets five boring minutes and then I leave."
"Callie-"
"But." I held up a finger before she could detonate.
"You two can follow me in your car and wait in the parking lot.
Vaughn can lean on the hood and look like a Viking.
" Vaughn, from the dining room, called out, "I do lean good.
" I almost laughed. "And the second I sit down in that office, my phone goes face-down on my knee with the voice memo running.
Whatever he says, I'll have it. Every word. "
Tessa stared at me, and I watched her rage turn into something prouder. "Look at you. Documenting."
"I learned it from a terrifying woman at a DMV."
"Ollie stays with us, then."
"I'll come with Mom." Oliver was in the doorway, puzzle piece in hand, having materialized like a small auditor.
"There's a bench outside the office where they keep the lost and found.
I'll bring my book." He leveled that flat gaze at me.
"Also, I've had two schedule changes this week.
If I stay here, that's three. I don't love it. "
I looked at my son, who would rather sit on a hard bench than have one more thing change. "Okay, bud. Bench and book. Ten minutes."
At the door Tessa grabbed my hand and squeezed hard enough to hurt.
"We'll be twenty feet away the whole time.
And twin?" Twenty years of calling each other that, and she only pulled it out when she meant business.
Her eyes were still red from the crying and the laughing, and fierce as anything.
"Whatever that cologne-soaked small-dicked tyrant thinks is about to happen in there… he has no idea who he's dealing with."
I smiled like I believed her, called Oliver over into the car, and pulled out with a biker and a pregnant woman riding escort behind me, plus a maybe I couldn't look at yet in my chest, a voice memo app open on my phone, and a feeling that the five minutes in Darren's office was about to change everything.