Chapter Six The Ordinary Weight of Things
The alarm went off at 6:15 AM.
Miu had been awake since 5:47. She knew this because she had checked her phone three times, watching the minutes crawl forward like they were trying to escape something.
The ceiling crack was still there. The cat was still on her pillow.
The pregnancy was still inside her, tiny and invisible and absolutely undeniable.
She turned off the alarm. Lay still.
Morning routines were supposed to be automatic. Wake up. Brush teeth. Make coffee. Forget to eat breakfast. Run out the door. But nothing felt automatic anymore. Every movement came with a question attached, like a receipt she hadn't asked for.
Brush teeth. The toothpaste tasted different now. Or maybe she was imagining it.
Make coffee. She wasn't supposed to have too much caffeine. Dr. Laurent had mentioned that. Miu made a half-caff and pretended it was the same.
Forget to eat breakfast. That one she kept. Some things didn't have to change.
---
The bathroom mirror showed her the same face she had seen every morning for twenty-nine years. Same dark circles. Same messy hair. Same slight asymmetry in her smile that her mother said made her look "interesting" and not "strange," which was the kind of compliment only a mother could give.
Miu leaned closer. Looked at her stomach. Flat. Unremarkable. No different than yesterday or the day before.
"How are you in there?" she asked.
The pregnancy did not answer. It was two weeks old. It didn't have ears.
She pulled on jeans that still fit, a t-shirt that said I'm not arguing, I'm explaining why I'm right, and her usual canvas jacket with the hole in the left pocket. The cat hoodie was in the laundry. She mourned it briefly.
The bus came at 7:23.
Miu stood at the stop with six other people who were all at various stages of waking up. A woman in scrubs scrolled through her phone. A man in a hard hat drank from a thermos. A teenager with purple headphones bobbed her head to music Miu couldn't hear.
Normal. Everything looked normal.
She got on the bus. Sat by the window. Pressed her forehead against the cold glass and watched Vancouver slide past—apartment buildings, coffee shops, a dog walker with seven leashes, a billboard for a movie she hadn't seen.
Pregnant.
The word sat in her chest like a stone. Not heavy exactly. Just present. Solid. Unmovable.
She had been avoiding the question for ten days.
Will I keep it? She had let herself get lost in the logistics—the clinic, the emails, the terrifying mother who ordered tea she didn't drink.
She had let herself focus on Lena, on the absurdity of the situation, on the spreadsheet that probably existed somewhere with her name on it.
But the question was still there. Had always been there.
Do I want this?
The bus stopped. More people got on. Miu watched them find seats, hold rails, stare into middle distance. Any one of them could be carrying something unexpected. Any one of them could be pretending everything was fine.
She was good at pretending. She had pretended through her visa denial, through the rejection letters, through the months when her bank account had dipped below three hundred dollars and she had eaten rice and eggs for two weeks straight. She could pretend through this.
But pretending wasn't the same as deciding.
---
Golden Thread Pictures occupied the third floor of a building that had been a warehouse in a previous life. The floors were concrete. The windows were huge. The heating system was a suggestion rather than a promise.
Miu's desk was in the corner, near the window that didn't close all the way. She had a plant that was dying, a mug that said World's Okayest Writer, and a stack of script pages that she had been meaning to revise for approximately six weeks.
She sat down. Stared at her computer.
The cursor blinked.
"You look like garbage."
Miu looked up. Colin from development was standing over her, holding a smoothie that was an aggressive shade of green.
"Thank you," she said. "You look like you're drinking swamp water."
"Kale. It's good for you." He took a sip. Made a face. "Anyway, the showrunner wants the revised pages by Friday."
"Friday is four days away."
"Hence the urgency."
Colin walked away. Miu watched him go, then turned back to her screen.
The script was about a woman who accidentally starts a revolution after her cat escapes during a protest. It was supposed to be a comedy.
Miu had written the first draft before any of this happened, and now the jokes felt flat and the protagonist seemed naive and the whole thing read like someone else had written it.
She opened the document. Read the first line. Closed it.
Opened it again.
Maybe I shouldn't keep it.
The thought arrived without warning, the way thoughts sometimes did—not as a decision, but as a possibility. An option. A door that existed whether she wanted to look at it or not.
She had options. Dr. Laurent had been clear about that. Termination was safe, legal, and available. No one would blame her. No one would even have to know, except Lena, and Lena had said—what had Lena said? I'm not trying to take anything from you.
But that wasn't the same as I'll support whatever you choose.
Miu didn't know what Lena would say if she decided to end the pregnancy. She didn't know what she wanted Lena to say.
This is too complicated, she thought. I didn't sign up for complicated. I signed up for vitamins.
---
Lunchtime. Miu sat in the break room with a sad sandwich and her phone.
She had been avoiding this call for days. Weeks, almost. Her mother called every Sunday, and Miu had been giving excuses—busy with work, tired, signal problems. The excuses were running out.
She pressed dial before she could talk herself out of it.
The phone rang twice. Then: "Miu! Finally. I was beginning to think you'd been kidnapped."
Her mother's voice was warm and loud and slightly accusatory, the way it had always been.
Aroon Srisuwan had raised three children on a nurse's salary and a stubborn refusal to accept defeat.
She had immigrated to Canada with nothing, worked double shifts for a decade, and somehow still found time to pack lunches and attend parent-teacher conferences and make sure her children knew exactly how much she had sacrificed for them.
Miu loved her. She also avoided telling her things.
"Sorry, Mae. Work has been crazy."
"Work is always crazy. That's not new. You sound different."
Miu's stomach clenched. "Different how?"
"Tired. Stressed. Like you're carrying something heavy."
If only you knew, Miu thought. She took a bite of her sandwich to buy time. Chewed. Swallowed.
"I'm fine," she said. "Just busy."
"Miu." Her mother's voice shifted. Softer now. The voice she used when she wasn't going to let something go. "I've been a mother for thirty-five years. I know when something is wrong with my child. You don't have to tell me what it is, but don't tell me you're fine when you're not."
Miu closed her eyes. The break room hummed—the refrigerator, the microwave, the distant sound of someone typing. Her sandwich sat on the table, half-eaten and uninteresting.
"It's complicated," she said.
"Complicated how?"
"I can't—I don't know how to explain it yet."
A pause. Then her mother said, quietly, "Miu.
When I was pregnant with you, I was terrified.
I was twenty-three years old, in a new country, with no family and very little money.
Your father was working two jobs. We lived in a basement apartment that flooded every time it rained.
And every morning, I would wake up and think, I can't do this. I'm not ready. This is a mistake."
Miu's throat tightened. Her mother had never told her this.
"But then," her mother continued, "I would feel you move. Just a little flutter. Like a butterfly trapped in a jar. And I would think, This is not a mistake. This is just hard. And hard things are still worth doing."
Miu pressed her hand against her stomach. Flat. Unremarkable. No butterfly. No flutter. Just a cluster of cells that might become a person, if she let it.
"I don't know what to do," Miu whispered.
"You don't have to know right now. You just have to keep showing up. That's what being a mother is. Showing up even when you're scared. Even when you're not ready. Even when the basement floods."
"I'm not—" Miu stopped. She had almost said I'm not a mother. But that wasn't true anymore, was it? She was carrying something. Someone. A potential. And potential, her mother had taught her, was the most expensive thing in the world.
"Mae," she said. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Did you ever regret it? Having us?"
Silence. The kind of silence that filled a room and changed the pressure inside it.
"Never," her mother said. "Not once. There were days I regretted my circumstances. Days I regretted the lack of sleep and the lack of money and the lack of help. But I never regretted you. Any of you. You were the best thing I ever did. The hardest, yes. But the best."
Miu's eyes burned. She blinked hard.
"Mae, I have to go. My lunch break is almost over."
"Okay, baby. But call me more often. And eat something green. You look pale."
"I'm always pale. I live in Vancouver."
"Eat something green anyway."
The call ended. Miu sat in the break room with her phone in her hand and her sandwich forgotten and a feeling spreading through her chest that she couldn't quite name.
The best thing I ever did. The hardest, but the best.
She looked down at her stomach. Flat. Unremarkable. The same stomach she had woken up with for twenty-nine years.
Different now.
Maybe, she thought, I want it to be different.
---
The afternoon passed in a blur of emails and meetings and Colin asking for pages she hadn't written. Miu nodded and said "soon" and "working on it" and other phrases that meant nothing. Her mind was elsewhere.
Hard things are still worth doing.
She had spent her whole life avoiding hard things.
She had chosen screenwriting because it was creative and flexible and didn't require a desk job.
She had chosen Vancouver because it was far from her mother's expectations.
She had chosen to be single, to rent a cheap apartment, to live a life that required very little of her.
And now here was something that required everything.
She left work at 5:47 PM. The bus was crowded. She stood near the back, holding the overhead rail, swaying with the motion of the vehicle. The woman next to her was holding a baby—a small one, wrapped in a yellow blanket, asleep with its mouth open.
Miu looked at the baby. The baby's mother looked at Miu. Smiled. The automatic smile of strangers acknowledging each other's existence.
"Congratulations," the woman said, nodding at Miu's stomach.
Miu blinked. "What?"
"Oh, I'm sorry—I thought—you're not—" The woman's face flushed. "I'm so sorry. You were touching your stomach, and I just assumed—"
Miu looked down. Her hand was resting on her abdomen. She hadn't noticed.
"It's fine," Miu said. "I'm not. I mean, I might be. It's complicated."
The woman nodded like she understood, even though she probably didn't. The bus stopped. The woman got off with her baby. Miu watched them go.
Maybe, she thought again. Maybe I want this.
---
Her apartment was dark when she got home. The cat was on the couch, which was his preferred location when he wasn't on her pillow or the kitchen counter or the one spot on the floor that got afternoon sun.
She fed him. Made tea. Sat on the couch with her legs tucked under her and her phone in her lap.
Tina had texted: Update???
Miu typed: I think I'm keeping it.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Tina: Okay.
Miu: That's it? Just okay?
Tina: It's your body. Your choice. I'll be here either way. But also, yes, okay. I'll start knitting.
Miu: You don't know how to knit.
Tina: I'll learn.
Miu laughed. The sound surprised her. It felt rusty, like a drawer that hadn't been opened in a while.
She set down her phone. Picked up her tea. The cat climbed into her lap and started purring, and she let him.
I'm going to be a mother.
The thought should have been terrifying. It was terrifying. But underneath the fear, underneath the uncertainty and the chaos and the accidental nature of all of this, there was something else. Something smaller. Something that felt, impossibly, like hope.
She put her hand on her stomach again. Flat. Unremarkable.
But maybe not for long.
---
Across the city, in an apartment that was too clean and too quiet, Lena Thomson was packing a suitcase.
She didn't know yet that Miu had decided. She didn't know that the cluster of cells inside a stranger's body had just become something more—a choice, a commitment, a future that neither of them had planned.
She only knew that she was moving to a neighborhood she had never visited, to an apartment she had never seen, to be closer to a woman who had laughed at her mother and called her a robot and somehow, against all logic, made Lena want to smile.
She folded a sweater. Placed it in the suitcase. Thought about Miu's hands—bitten nails, elegant fingers—and the way she had held her coffee cup like it was the only warm thing in the room.
This is not a business deal, she reminded herself.
But she was showing up anyway.
The hardest things are still worth doing.