8. Bree
— ? —
Bree
The bus station in Nowheresville, Pennsylvania, smelled worse than I’d expected.
I’d gotten off the train in Philadelphia because it was the first stop that didn’t feel too close to New York, and then I’d taken a bus because buses were anonymous, and then the bus had broken down in some town whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn, and now I was sitting on a plastic bench under a departures board that hadn’t updated in forty minutes.
My suitcase sat at my feet and my purse in my lap, and my stomach was staging a revolt.
I’d been sitting here for over an hour, staring at the board without seeing it, trying to figure out where to go. Not New York, not Texas where my father would take one look at my face and start asking questions I couldn’t answer, and not anywhere familiar, anywhere they’d think to look for me.
If they thought to look for me.
I couldn’t stop circling back to it. Would Rafael look? Would he send someone? Would he even notice I was gone beyond the inconvenience of unsigned divorce papers?
I’ve never known.
My stomach lurched.
I clapped a hand over my mouth and focused on breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The nausea had been coming and going for days, some combination of stress and heartbreak and the fast food I’d been eating since I couldn’t stomach the thought of a real meal.
A woman settled onto the bench beside me. Older. Gray-haired. Wearing a cardigan despite the heat and carrying a canvas bag with a cross-stitch pattern on the side.
“You all right, honey?”
I nodded without looking at her.
“You sure? You’ve been sitting here a while. I noticed when I went to get my coffee, and that was ages ago.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You look like you’re about to be sick.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before my body decided to prove her right.
I bolted for the bathroom and made it to the first stall just in time, dropping to my knees on the grimy tile, and threw up everything I’d eaten in the last twelve hours, which wasn’t much.
When I was done, I sat back on my heels and pressed my forehead to the cool metal of the stall divider and tried to remember the last time I’d felt this awful.
The bathroom door opened. Footsteps approached.
“Thought you might need this.”
The woman from the bench was holding out a paper towel and a bottle of water. Her face was kind. Concerned. The face of someone who actually gave a damn about strangers in bus stations.
“Thank you.” My voice came out hoarse.
“Don’t mention it.” She waited while I wiped my face and took a small sip of water. “Better?”
“Not really.”
“Didn’t think so.” She was looking at me with an expression I didn’t have a name for. “When I was pregnant with my first, the morning sickness was a nightmare. Couldn’t keep anything down for three months straight.”
I froze.
“Morning sickness?”
“That’s what this looks like to me. The way you were sitting out there, hand on your stomach. The color in your face. And now this.” She gestured vaguely at the toilet. “I’ve seen it enough times to recognize it.”
“I’m not pregnant.”
The words came out automatic. Defensive.
“You sure about that?” Her voice was gentle, not accusatory. “When was your last period?”
I opened my mouth to answer. Closed it. Tried to remember.
The broadcast had been three days ago, and before that the fitting room, and before that the gala and the birthday lunch that wasn’t. And underneath all of it, the nights, Rafael reaching for me in the dark the way he always did, the one language we never fumbled. The last time barely a month ago.
We’d never once used protection.
We were married. We were supposed to be trying for a baby, according to the contract terms neither of us ever talked about.
I’d stopped tracking my cycle a long time ago, because it had seemed pointless, because Rafael never asked, because pregnancy had started to feel more mythical than possible.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember.”
The woman’s expression shifted. Softened.
“You never took a test?”
“No. I didn’t think… I mean, we weren’t exactly…
” I trailed off. I couldn’t explain to this stranger that my husband and I had sex regularly but never talked about children.
That he came to me at night but never once spoke about the future.
That I’d stopped hoping for a baby because I’d started to suspect he didn’t want one.
“Stay here,” the woman said. “I’ll be right back.”
She left. I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the stall divider and stared at the water-stained ceiling and tried to do math.
If I was pregnant.
If I was actually, genuinely pregnant.
If the nausea wasn’t stress and the missed periods weren’t grief and my body had been trying to tell me and I’d been too distracted to hear it.
The woman came back. She was carrying a plastic bag from the convenience store across the street.
“Here.” She handed it to me. “I got two, just in case the first one’s defective.”
I looked inside. Two pregnancy tests in pink boxes. Cheerful fonts promising accurate results in three minutes.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “But you look like you could use some answers. And some kindness. Both are free today.”
I almost started crying again.
“I’ll wait outside,” she said. “Take your time.”
She left.
I stared at the boxes for a long moment. Then I opened one, read the instructions three times even though they were simple, and did what I needed to do.
Three minutes. The instructions said three minutes.
I set the test on the edge of the sink and watched the seconds tick by on my phone. Outside, I could hear the bus station. Announcements crackling over the speaker. Footsteps echoing on tile. The ordinary sounds of ordinary people going ordinary places.
Two minutes.
I thought about Rafael. About his face when I’d asked if he loved me. About the blankness in his eyes, the hesitation, the words that had shattered whatever was left of my hope.
I’ve never known.
One minute.
I thought about the blackout and the kitchen island, the way he’d held me after and promised things would be different, and then the bouquet with the typed card.
Apologies for the disruption.
Thirty seconds.
I thought about Camille’s words in the fitting room. Two and a half years and you couldn’t even get pregnant. The one job the contract gave you.
I picked up the test.
Two pink lines.
I stared at them. Stared and stared, waiting for them to disappear, to blur, to reveal themselves as some cruel optical illusion.
They didn’t.
Two pink lines. Clear and bright and undeniable.
I was pregnant.
I was pregnant, and I’d just left my husband, and I was sitting in a bus station bathroom in the middle of Pennsylvania with nowhere to go and no one to call and a baby growing inside me that I hadn’t planned for and didn’t know what to do with.
The door opened, and the woman poked her head in.
“Well?”
I held up the test. My hand was shaking.
“Oh, honey.” She crossed the room and put her arm around my shoulders. “It’s going to be all right. Whatever’s happening, whatever situation you’re in, it’s going to be all right.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t have to know right now. Right now, you just have to breathe.”
I breathed. The woman held me while I shook, this stranger in a bus station bathroom who’d shown me more kindness in twenty minutes than my husband had shown me in months.
“I’m Molly,” she said. “Molly Peterson. I’m from a little town called Marigold, down in Texas. I was visiting my sister up here, but I’m headed home today.”
“I’m Bree.”
“Pretty name.” Molly pulled back, looked at me. “Bree, do you have somewhere to go? Someone to call?”
I thought about my father. He’d want to know. He’d want to help. But if I called him, he’d worry, and he’d ask questions, and eventually he’d find out about the baby, and then Rafael would find out, and then everything would get complicated in ways I couldn’t handle right now.
I thought about my mother. Same problem.
Friends? I didn’t have any. Not real ones. Manhattan was full of acquaintances and connections and people who smiled at me at parties, but there was no one I could call at 2 a.m., no one who knew the real me, no one who would help without asking questions.
“No,” I said. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Molly didn’t answer right away. Her arm was still around my shoulders, warm and steady.
“You could come with me,” she said.
“What?”
“To Marigold. It’s small. Quiet. Nobody there would know you or care about whatever you’re running from. I’ve got a spare room. You could stay until you figure things out.”
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering.” She squeezed my shoulders. “I don’t know your story, Bree. I don’t need to know. But I know what it looks like when someone’s lost, and you’re lost. Let me help. Just for a little while. Until you find your feet.”
I stared at her. This woman I’d known for less than an hour. This stranger who was offering me everything I needed and asking for nothing in return.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would you help someone you don’t even know?”
“Because someone helped me once.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “When I was young and stupid and in trouble, someone I’d never met offered me a place to stay. Changed my whole life. I figure the least I can do is pass it on.”
The bus announcement crackled overhead. Final boarding for the 4:15 to Dallas.
“That’s my bus,” Molly said. “There’s room for two. If you want it.”
I thought about Rafael. About the penthouse I’d left behind. About the life I’d been building in a city that had never felt like home.
I thought about the two pink lines. The baby I hadn’t planned for. The future I couldn’t imagine.
And Texas. Red dirt and wide skies and the smell of rain on hot pavement. The place I’d grown up. The place I’d left.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll come.”
We made it to the bus with three minutes to spare. Molly helped me with my suitcase. We found seats near the back, side by side, and I pressed my forehead to the window and watched Pennsylvania give way to Maryland give way to Virginia.
“You all right?” Molly asked, somewhere around Tennessee.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s fair.”
The miles rolled by. I slept in fits and starts, waking with my hand pressed to my stomach, still not quite believing what was happening inside me.
Texas appeared on the horizon just before dawn. Red soil. Flat fields. The familiar landscape of home.
I made a decision.
“Molly.”
“Hmm?”
“The baby’s father. He can’t know about this.”
She let that sit. I felt her looking at me.
“That’s your choice to make.”
“He didn’t want me. He made that clear.” I kept my eyes on the window, on the Texas sky turning pink with sunrise. “Why would he want our baby?”
“I don’t know, honey. I don’t know your situation.”
“He wouldn’t.” The words came out hard and certain. “He’d dismiss our child the way he dismissed me. And I won’t let that happen. I won’t let anyone make my baby feel the way he made me feel.”
Molly reached over and patted my back. Her hand was warm and steady.
“Then that’s your choice,” she said. “And whatever you need to make it work, I’ll help. That’s what I’m here for.”
The bus pulled into Marigold just after 7 a.m. It was exactly what Molly had promised: small, quiet, a place where everyone knew everyone and strangers were noticed but not questioned.
I stepped off the bus with my suitcase in one hand and my future in the other, and I looked up at the Texas sky and made a promise to the baby I hadn’t met yet.
“I’m going to sell my jewelry,” I said, quiet enough that only Molly could hear. “I’m going to find a place to live. I’m going to build a life here. And you’re never going to feel invisible. Not for one single day of your life.”
Molly put her arm around me.
“You’re going to be okay, Bree.”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe that this could work, that I could raise a child alone, that I could build a life in a town I’d never heard of with a woman I’d just met and a baby growing inside me.
I had to believe it.
Because the alternative was going back. And I’d never go back.
I pressed my hand to my stomach and felt nothing, no movement, no flutter, nothing yet. But soon. Soon there would be a heartbeat. Soon there would be kicks. Soon there would be a baby who needed me to be strong, to be brave, to be everything my husband had never been.
“I’m going to be okay,” I said.
Molly squeezed my shoulders.
The Texas sun rose over Marigold, warm and golden and full of promises I was going to keep.
He’d never know about this baby.
I’d make sure of it.