29. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
The church bathroom wasn’t where I expected to spend the morning of Harry and Hugo’s wedding.
And yet here I was, on my knees in front of the toilet in a borrowed bridesmaid’s dress, losing whatever was left of last night’s dinner while Kevin held my hair back and rubbed slow circles on my spine. The tiles were cold through the thin fabric at my knees.
“Shh,” he murmured. “It’s okay. Get it all out.”
“This is humiliating,” I groaned between heaves.
“This is being human. Nothing humiliating about it.”
Another wave hit and I gripped the porcelain, knuckles white. Kevin kept holding my hair, kept rubbing my back, steady and unbothered while I came apart in a rented dress.
When it finally passed, I slumped against the cool wall and let my head fall back.
“Did you eat anything this morning?” Kevin asked, his brow furrowed with concern.
“No. Too busy. There was so much to do and Harry needed help with her dress and the flowers arrived late and-”
“Steph.”
“I know. I should have eaten.”
He wet a paper towel at the sink and pressed it to my forehead. The cool of it was heaven.
“Better?”
“A little.” I closed my eyes. “I’m kind of dizzy.”
“Dizzy how? Room spinning dizzy or lightheaded dizzy?”
“Lightheaded. And my head hurts.”
“Tell me all your symptoms.” He was in doctor mode now, clinical and focused, and it steadied me, the way he narrowed the whole chaotic world down to a problem he could solve. “I’ll figure out what to get you.”
I rinsed my mouth with water cupped from the tap, then dug into my purse for my travel toothbrush. Even the mint made my stomach churn, but I forced myself to brush away the sour taste, watching my own pale face in the mirror.
“Dizzy,” I listed around the toothbrush. “Not much appetite. Headache. Wanting to throw up every morning.”
Kevin went very still behind me. In the mirror I watched the color leave his face.
“Every morning?” His voice had gone careful, each word set down with terrible precision. “Not just today?”
I turned to look at him instead of his reflection. “I’ve felt it on and off for a few weeks. Maybe a month.”
We stared at each other.
The bathroom suddenly felt very small. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and the organ music swelled somewhere beyond the door, someone warming up for a ceremony we were supposed to be at the front of.
“Okay,” Kevin said slowly. “It’s either a stomach bug, or-”
His words died in his throat. His eyes had gone glassy and bright.
“It could just be stress,” I said weakly. “The wedding planning. The clinic. Everything.”
“It could be.” He swallowed, hard, his throat working. “But those symptoms. Combined. For a month.”
“I know.”
“There’s still an hour and a half until the ceremony.” He stood, and his voice steadied into a plan. “Wait here, love. I’ll be right back.”
“Kevin.”
He was already at the door, one hand on the frame. “I need to check. I need to know. I can’t-” He caught himself, took a breath. “I’ll be right back. Five minutes.”
He disappeared, and the door swung shut behind him with a soft pneumatic hiss.
I sat on the closed toilet lid and pressed my hand flat against my belly. It felt the same as always, soft and unremarkable, no different than it had a month ago. No different than it had three years ago, either, in the weeks before I learned how quickly the ground could open.
But those symptoms. I knew what they meant. I’d felt them before, briefly, during the twelve weeks of hope before everything fell apart on a staircase in the dark.
It couldn’t be, could it?
It had taken us four years to conceive the first time.
Four years of temperature charts and ovulation apps, of sex scheduled to the hour until it stopped feeling like ours at all.
Four years of that little white stick showing one lonely line while I sat on the edge of the tub and told myself next month.
We couldn’t have done it in barely two months of being back together.
Could we?
The door opened.
“It’s me.” Kevin slipped inside, a small white paper bag crumpled in his fist. “I found a pharmacy two blocks away. Ran the whole way.”
He was breathing hard, chest heaving under his groomsman’s shirt, the top button already undone. His usually perfect hair stood up where the wind had shoved it. He looked terrified and completely undone, and I loved him so much it frightened me.
“We need to make sure,” he said. “The symptoms could be anything, but I need to know.”
“I’m scared,” I admitted, and my voice came out very small.
He knelt in front of me on the cold tile and took both my hands in his, chafing them warm.
“I’m right here,” he said softly. “Whatever happens. Whatever the result. I’m right here.”
He helped me tear open the box. I read the instructions even though I remembered them perfectly, the clinical language, the precise timing, the two minutes that could stretch out longer than any two minutes had a right to.
I went into the stall. Did what needed to be done. Came out and set the test on the counter, face down beside the little dish of decorative soaps.
Kevin capped it and set a timer on his phone. We stood side by side at the sink, our shoulders touching, and looked at our reflection in the mirror because it was easier than looking at the countertop.
“Two minutes,” I said.
“Longest two of my life.”
We held hands so tight my fingers went numb. Neither of us looked at the test. Neither of us looked away from each other’s eyes in the glass.
“Whatever happens,” Kevin said quietly, “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“And if it’s positive, I’ll take care of you. More checkups than you could possibly want. The best doctors. I’ll be there for every appointment, every ultrasound, every moment.”
“I know,” I said, and squeezed his fingers.
“I won’t miss a single thing. Not one single thing. I swear on my life.”
And there it was, the thing neither of us would name in this little tiled room. The eleven calls. The voicemail box that filled while he sat at a dinner table across town. I heard all of it under his words, and I heard him trying to build new over the ruin of it.
“I know, Kevin.”
His voice cracked down the middle. “I can’t mess this up again. I can’t.”
“You won’t.”
His phone alarm went off, a bright cheerful chime that felt obscene. Time was up.
I looked at Kevin. He looked at me.
“You can do it,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or himself.
“Let’s close our eyes,” I suggested. “We’ll look together.”
We both closed our eyes. I reached blindly for the test and held it up in front of us.
“At the count of three,” I said. “One.”
“Two,” he whispered.
“Three.”
We opened our eyes.
Two pink lines. Bold, unmistakable, both of them.
Positive.
I was already crying before my brain fully caught up to what I was seeing. Kevin made a sound that was half laugh and half sob, and pulled me into his arms so hard my feet nearly left the floor.
“Holy shit, love,” he breathed into my hair. “Holy shit.”
“It’s positive.”
“Look at it. Two lines.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“You’re pregnant.” He pulled back to look at my face, his eyes red and streaming, his hands framing my jaw with the softest care. “We’re going to have a baby.”
And then the fear came, right on the heels of the joy, clawing up through my chest. “What if something goes wrong? What if it happens again?”
He shook his head, firm, certain. “Everything will be okay. We’ll have more checkups than any pregnancy in history. I’ll take care of you. We’ll be careful. We’ll be okay.”
“You promise?”
“On everything I have.” He pressed his forehead to mine, and I felt his breath shake against my mouth. “I swear it.”
I decided to believe him. The fear hadn’t gone anywhere, but I was tired of living inside it. Just for today, I’d push it aside and let myself be happy.
We smiled at each other through our tears, and then we started laughing at the pure absurdity of it, finding out we were pregnant in a church bathroom on my brother’s wedding day, the soaps and the buzzing lights and the discarded box in the trash.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Let’s gooo,” Harry’s voice called through it. “Steph, I need you! The ceremony starts in forty-five minutes!”
I frantically fixed my makeup while Kevin disposed of the evidence, wrapping it in paper towels and burying it deep in the bin. In the mirror I looked the same as I had this morning. A little pale, maybe. A little wrecked around the eyes.
But underneath, everything had changed.
“Okay.” Kevin turned me by the shoulders to face him and examined my face with the same attention he gave a chart. “You’re gorgeous. We’re ready.”
“Then let’s go get your sister married,” I said, and my hand drifted to my belly without my permission.
He placed his hand over mine, warm and broad, both of us covering the secret between us.
We walked out together into the hallway.
“Shit!” I stopped short two steps down the corridor. “I forgot my bouquet!”
Kevin laughed and sprinted to the bridesmaid changing room, dress shoes slapping the stone floor. He returned in under a minute, flowers held aloft.
“Not under my watch,” he said with a wink, handing them over.
The music started, a low swell of strings through the double doors.
Kevin offered me his arm. As groomsman and bridesmaid, we would walk down the aisle together, leading the procession before the bride.
The church doors opened. Warm light and the faces of everyone I loved turned toward us.
I saw my mother in the front row, already dabbing at her eyes with a folded tissue. My father beside her, chin up, looking prouder than I’d seen him in years. Tris and Lando on the other side, beaming so hard it had to hurt.
We walked down the aisle slowly, matching our pace to the music, our steps falling into rhythm the way they always had on a dance floor. Kevin’s hand covered mine where it rested on his arm.
We took our places at the altar.
Then the music changed, and the first notes of the processional rose.
Everyone stood.
Harry appeared at the back of the church.