Chapter 21
Life Changes
Riley
The bathroom tiles are cold enough to make my kneecaps ring.
I tug the hem of Jason’s T-shirt lower like fabric can negotiate with ceramic.
The fan hums its useless white noise above me—steady, falsely kind.
On the edge of the tub, the stick I told myself I didn’t need blooms its verdict in slow motion.
One line arrives like a breath I didn’t take. The second follows—faint, then brighter—bleeding into existence as if it remembers me. Two pink lines. Simple, ruthless geometry.
My pulse drums in my throat. I read the insert again even though the icon is thumbnail-small and my brain knows what it means. Two lines: pregnant. The word is small on the page and enormous in my chest. The room tilts six degrees, then settles around a different word entirely.
Baby.
I don’t say it out loud. Sound would make it real, and real would blow a hole through the carefully laminated plans that got me this far. I press my palms to my eyes until stars spark; when they fade, the lines don’t.
I sit back on my heels because I don’t trust standing.
The bathmat is the cheap drugstore kind—thin, pilled, somehow the only soft thing in the world.
The test lies on the tub edge like a polite weapon.
I think about the training room—protocols, checklists, all the ways I control risk.
None of those sheets have a bullet point for this.
Nausea tightens low and mean. I breathe the way I tell players to breathe through sting: in for four, out for six—again, again—until my throat unlocks. The fan chews the air and fails to swallow the truth.
I pick up the test because hiding it in the trash feels like lying to the future. The plastic is still warm. In the tiny window, my reflection is half an eye and a smudge of hair; I look like a stranger peering through a keyhole.
Noise from the apartment moves toward me—pipes clack, the radiator complains, the city pours itself down the street.
I shouldn’t be here. I should be at the facility, seven a.m. with compliance, telling neat versions of messy things.
Anywhere but this floor holding a life raft I didn’t know I’d inflated.
Baby. The word doesn’t explode me. It rearranges me. It stacks everything I knew into a different architecture and asks me to walk through the door anyway.
I set the test gently on a folded towel and reach for my phone with hands that don’t feel entirely mine.
The lock screen is a cascade of obligations—calendar blocks, a reminder to send Ducks a hamstring update—the tidy life I’ve built out of chaos.
I look past all of it to the clock. 7:03. Later is now and also a lifetime away.
I rinse my mouth because the taste of metal won’t leave. Water beads on my knuckles. Jason kissed those knuckles last night like they were a story he wanted to read to the end. Heat unfurls under my ribs. Cold curls around it.
Two lines. Two lives, maybe. One decision at a time.
I stand carefully and tuck the test into my hoodie pocket because keeping it close feels less like pretending. The mirror catches me mid-motion—eyes too bright, mouth too steady. I tip my chin the way I do before I walk back to a bench full of bodies and problems and pretend my hands don’t shake.
“Okay,” I tell the fan, because it’s listening. “Okay.”
A knock rattles the apartment door—three quick, two slow. Sophie’s knock. Of course she feels the wobble through a text that said only you around?
I open the bathroom and the world smells like coffee, rain, and Sophie’s perfume—bright citrus that insists on morning even when the day doesn’t deserve it. She steps in with a tray of lattes, hair a dark, determined halo under her hood.
“Found the only barista in the city who believes in eye contact,” she announces—then really looks at me. The tray dips. “Oh.”
I don’t try to smile. I hold up the folded towel like a white flag and open it. The stick lies there—quiet, undeniable. Two pink lines breathing the room’s air.
Sophie sets the coffees down with surgeon care and crosses the tile in two steps. Her arms are around me before I can decide if I’m ready. I am. I fold into her like a building finding scaffolding. She’s small but steel; her chin digs into my shoulder with exactly the right hurt.
“It’s okay,” she says into my neck, warm and fierce. “Okay to be scared and okay to be happy and okay to be both at once.”
My laugh breaks into something that isn’t a laugh. I get my arms fully around her and breathe curls and citrus and the smell of someone who’s sat on a lot of locker-room floors with me and refused to let me disappear.
When we separate, she palms my cheeks, checking pupils like after a hit. “You with me?”
“I’m here,” I say—true and thin. “I’m… here.”
She nods, decisive. “Then hear me: Whatever you choose, I’m with you. No qualifiers. If you want a ride, a wall, a fire to set—I’m your girl.”
My throat does the tight thing. “I don’t even know what choosing looks like yet.” I glance at the towel; the test looks back, absolute. “I’m supposed to be at compliance answering questions about optics.”
Sophie makes a face that could curdle sponsorship dollars. “Optics can eat me. You breathing comes first.” She nudges a latte toward me. “Sip.”
I do, because following instructions is all I can do this second. It’s too sweet and exactly right.
“If I say the word living in my throat—if I say it—”
“It won’t explode the room,” she says, softer. “I checked.”
“I have a job,” I say instead, both statement and shield. “A whole life I built not to need anyone.”
“And you still don’t have to need anyone,” she says. “Needing something isn’t being needy. Also, newsflash: people need people. Even you, Robo-Trainer.”
It pulls a real, small laugh. Space opens in my chest. I nod toward the towel. “There’s… a him.” Safer than his name, like I’m not summoning a storm. “He said the right things last night. He meant them.” My mouth twists. “I want to believe it enough not to check the door for exits.”
Her eyes go kind and sharp. “Then let him try. But also: you get to be the headline in your life. Not his. Not theirs.”
I inhale until my ribs protest. The apartment listens. “Whatever I choose,” I repeat, and it lands in my bones.
She squeezes my hand once. “Whatever you choose,” she echoes. “I’m with you.”
We stand in the bathroom with the fan humming, rain tempering down, and two coffees cooling. For a second, the world is exactly the size of her promise.
Sophie props a hip against the counter as I pull up the clinic number. The website is cheerful about accessibility and confidential care and a stock photo of a woman smiling into the middle distance. I press Call.
Hold music floods the room—tinny piano pretending to be a river. Every thirty seconds a recorded voice thanks me for my patience like it’s handing out stickers. I put it on speaker and set the phone between the cups so I don’t have to hold it with fingers that want to tremble.
“We can go anywhere,” Sophie says lightly. “Downtown, uptown, three neighborhoods over where no one knows your haircut.”
“I know,” I say—and mean thank you. The fan hums counterpoint to the piano. My pulse syncs with neither.
A live human arrives in my ear, a voice made of blankets. “Midtown Women’s Clinic—how can I help you?”
“Hi.” The word scrapes. “New patient. I… need to schedule an appointment.” The pause after I is a canyon. “As soon as possible.”
Keys clack. “We’re booking intake and confirmation. First available…” More clacking. Time stretches like tape pulled wrong. “Next Thursday at ten forty-five, or Friday at four ten.”
Next Thursday is an ocean away. Friday is a year. “Nothing sooner?” Polite voice; impolite chest.
“We can put you on the cancellation list,” Blanket Voice offers, kind and useless. “Urgent care could see you today, but they’ll likely refer you back here.”
Urgent care flashes in fluorescent light—paper curtains, neighbors’ cousins, the exact team logo on my lanyard. Privacy is thin enough already.
“Put me on the list,” I say. “And Friday at four ten.” The time drops like a pin on a map. With it comes shaky relief. Having a when makes the what bearable.
“Got you,” she says, and reads back my details like a lullaby—name, phone, email, birthday—as if any of that can triangulate how scared I am. “We’ll send a packet. Bring ID and insurance. Call if anything changes.”
“Thank you,” I say, and hang up before I ask for a magic trick.
The bathroom goes small with silence. Sophie bumps my shoulder. “Friday,” she says, like we won something. “I’ll drive. I’ll sit. I’ll run interference on nosy clipboard gremlins.”
I nod, staring at the calm font blooming on my screen.
New patient intake. The words press. I picture urgent care down the street, then the three phones that would buzz if someone saw me there: PR, compliance, Miles on an old emergency contact.
Shame prickles up my neck—ridiculous, sneaky, selling fear as failure. I hate how fast it finds me.
“I should be braver,” I mutter, annoyed at myself for saying it.
Sophie straightens like I blasphemed. “Choosing privacy isn’t cowardice. It’s strategy.” She taps my phone. “You don’t have to audition pain in public to make it count.”
Strategy slides into the spot anxiety was hogging. It fits better. “Strategy,” I echo.
Her mouth crooks. “Says the woman who loves a laminated protocol.”
A tired, grateful laugh escapes. I add the appointment to my calendar like a jewel thief—private, no details, a gray square that means everything. I set an alarm for an hour before labeled Breathe. Ridiculous. Necessary.
Sophie squeezes my wrist—a quick pulse of solidarity. “We’ll get you through Friday,” she says. “And through the three thousand minutes before it.”