forty #3
I traced the edge of the sonogram with my thumbnail. "Do you think I messed everything up?"
"Short answer?" She tilted her head. "No."
"Long answer?"
"You can't mess up something that was breaking you." She said it simply, like she was telling me the weather. "You protected yourself. That's not failure. That's grown."
I closed my eyes. It was such a small sentence and it opened a window in my chest.
"You don't have to decide your whole life this week, Mira," she said. "You can decide breakfast. You can decide to take a shower. You can decide not to look at your phone for an hour. You can decide to put on clean socks. Stacking little decisions is still a life."
"Since when did you get so wise?"
"Bitch I'm a mother now," she said, palm resting over her belly, "I have to be."
We both laughed, and my smile stayed this time.
"I'll reach out," I said, and the words scared me and soothed me at the same time. "Just... not today."
"Good boundary," Tati said. "Proud of you."
We cleared plates. She handed me a dishtowel and I pretended to dry things while mostly staring at the sonogram propped against the salt shaker like a framed photo.
When the dishes were done, she kissed my temple without making it a thing. "Shower. Try to get some sleep. Big mamas going to bed."
I nodded, throat thick. "Okay."
The guest room door was open, moonlight pooling over the little desk. A new notebook sat there, spine uncracked, a pen laid perfectly across it.
I touched the cover with my fingertips like it might bite.
Later, I told myself. After the shower. After the nap. After the first breath of a day that didn't ask me to be brave or small—just present.
Behind me, Tati hummed something low and sweet in the kitchen. The house didn't feel empty anymore. It felt like a place you could set something down and know it would still be there when you came back.
I closed the bathroom door, turned on the water, and let the steam rise around me like a kind of permission.
Steam clung to my skin even after I shut the water off.
I wrapped myself in a towel and stood there for a while, watching the mirror fog and clear, fog and clear, like it couldn't decide whether to show me back to myself.
My eyes were red, rimmed from lack of sleep, but they weren't wild anymore. Just tired.
The guest room felt warmer when I stepped in, soft afternoon light flattening into gold. Tati had even laid out clean sheets while I was hiding from the world—I noticed now how crisp they smelled, like lavender detergent. I slipped into a t-shirt and shorts and crawled under the covers.
I thought I'd drift immediately, but sleep didn't come. My body was still buzzing, heavy and restless at once. So I sat up, bare feet on the rug, and looked at the desk. The notebook sat there like it was waiting for me.
For a long time, I didn't move. My fingers itched but my chest resisted. Writing had always been the one place I didn't have to perform—no heels, no smiles, no clever words. Just me, ink on paper. But that had always been a double-edged thing too. Honest pages didn't let you look away.
Eventually, I got up, pulled the chair out, and sat.
The first page was blank. My hand hovered before I even uncapped the pen. When I finally touched it to the paper, the ink bled dark and certain.
I didn't start with Brooks. I didn't start with Sam.
I didn't even start with the house key on the counter.
I wrote about the shower—how the water had run until my skin pruned, how the steam felt like it was peeling off a layer I didn't want anymore.
How sometimes survival looks less like running and more like standing still.
Words spilled after that. Not neat, not even sentences sometimes, just pieces of me that had been crowding my ribs for days.
I wrote about the sound of heels against stairs, about the silence that chased me across the city, about the bench that felt colder the longer I sat on it.
About how blocking his name didn't stop it from ringing in my head.
I wrote about Tati's smile when she handed me that sonogram, about the weight of someone trusting me with their beginning. About how she saw me clearer than I'd been willing to see myself.
Somewhere between one page and the next, the sun fell. The house sank into quiet again, except now it was the safe kind. I could hear Tati moving around in the kitchen, her hum faint under the clatter of a pan. The smell of something sweet drifted down the hall, warm and grounding.
By the time I looked up, the notebook was heavy with scrawls. My hand cramped, ink smudged down the side of my palm. But the weight in my chest had shifted—still there, but spread out thinner, like it wasn't suffocating me anymore.
I flipped to a fresh page, pressed the tip of the pen down, and sat there breathing for a long while before I wrote the last line.
Who am I when no one's looking?
I stared at the words until they blurred. Then I closed the notebook, set the pen on top, and leaned back in the chair. For the first time in days, I didn't feel like I had to run.