Chapter 5
Audrey
Astrid's kitchen still smelled like Easton's grandmother's house underneath everything Astrid had added to it—the lemon soap on the counter, the coffee she made too strong, the dried herbs by the back door.
The recipe cards were still in the tin on the windowsill.
The brass lamp was still on the side table next to the leather chair in the living room.
Astrid had moved into this house without trying to erase the woman who built it.
Moose was under the table with his chin on my foot. Astrid was across from me with her hands around her mug and the face of a newlywed who was still catching herself smiling at nothing. She was doing it now. Small, private, the edge of it visible over the rim of her coffee.
"Stop it," I said.
"Stop what?"
"The face. The newlywed face. You've been doing it for forty minutes."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a face. It's the face of a woman who got laid this morning and is trying to pretend she didn't."
She laughed into her mug. Moose shifted under the table, resettling against my ankle with the sigh of a dog who had heard everything and judged none of it.
We talked for a while. The clinic, which was booking out two weeks now, had Astrid running from seven-fifty to past six most nights.
A golden retriever with pancreatitis who had eaten an entire stick of butter off somebody's counter.
Easton's shift schedule. My mother, who had called twice this week about a Wednesday knit-along she was launching at The Yarn Room, and who wanted Astrid to come, which was Colleen for I want you in a chair where I can gently interrogate you about married life.
"She means well," Astrid said.
"She always means well. That's the part that gets you."
Astrid smiled.
"So," she said. "You and Duke."
She said it lightly. No weight on it. Just a fact, offered back to me the same as she'd offer me the cream.
I could have deflected. I had a dozen lines ready—he's annoying, nothing happened, I was holding his tie because he was impaired.
I'd been running them in my head ever since that day, sharpening them against an audience I hadn't faced yet.
But this was Astrid, and Astrid had never once required me to perform for her, and I was too tired to hold the door shut with my best friend sitting three feet away.
“Alright, you got me. We slept together. Once. In the morning, we agreed it was a one-time thing, made a pact, and that was that.”
Astrid laughed. Not the polite version.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing."
"Astrid."
"Nothing, Audrey. I'm not saying anything."
"Say it."
"I'm not saying it." She pressed her lips together and looked at her coffee, and the laugh kept going at the corners of her mouth, even after she'd stopped making noise.
I waited her out.
She sobered eventually and set the mug down. "You know I'd be okay with it, right?"
"Astrid, I would rather be eaten alive by a bear than date Duke Rhodes."
"That's specific."
"I've given it thought."
"He's a good person, Audrey."
"He sent me a counter-playlist with seven Springsteen songs on it. Seven. He argued with me for two weeks about buttercream. He has opinions about font sizes."
"So do you."
"That's different. My opinions are correct."
Astrid was smiling at me—the smile she had when she could see through me and was choosing not to say so. I loved her for the choice. I also needed her to stop, because if she kept looking at me like that, I was going to tell her the thing I couldn't tell her.
My period was six days late.
I'd noticed on Thursday. I'd been in the bathroom before a shift, and the calendar app on my phone gave me the small red notification I usually ignored because my cycle ran like clockwork, twenty-eight days, give or take one, for the last ten years.
Six days was not give or take one. Six days was a number that meant something, and I knew exactly what it meant.
I'd been telling myself it was stress for five of those six days.
I was telling myself it was stress right now, sitting across from my best friend in her kitchen, her face holding the expression of a woman who wanted to know if I was okay and trusted me to tell her when I was ready.
I wasn’t ready.
"He's not for me," I said. "It was a night. A good night. It's done."
"Okay." Astrid nodded. "But you'd tell me? If something changed."
"Nothing's going to change."
She let it go. She stood up to refill her coffee, and I sat at the table with Moose's chin on my foot and the distance between what I'd just said and what I was not saying wide enough to fall into.
I left twenty minutes later. I sat in my car in the driveway for a full minute before I turned the key. The bungalow's kitchen window was warm in the early evening light, and I could see Astrid moving behind the glass, putting mugs in the sink, bending to say something to Moose.
I was fine. The stress explanation was sound. I'd worked four doubles in the last two weeks. My sleep was a wreck. My body was allowed to be off without it meaning anything.
I turned the key and pulled out of the driveway.
The weeks that followed were a negotiation with my own body.
The signs arrived quietly. A tenderness in my breasts that showed up mid-shift and didn't leave.
A wave of fatigue at two in the afternoon that had nothing to do with the hours I was working and everything to do with a heaviness my body recognized before my brain would let it.
I fell asleep on my couch at seven-thirty on a Wednesday still in scrubs, still in shoes, and woke at midnight with my hand on my stomach and no memory of putting it there.
I brushed my teeth and went to bed. I didn't take a test.
Taking a test made it real. As long as I didn't take a test, the math in my head was a theory, and a theory could be wrong, and wrong was the only version of this I was prepared to live inside.
The floor was busy. Mrs. Okafor was in her ninth hour, with her first baby, and her mother had flown in from Lagos two days ago.
She was sitting in the corner of the labor room with her hands folded and her eyes on her daughter.
She had the composure of someone who had done this four times and knew the difference between pain and danger.
I liked her. I liked Mrs. Okafor, too—a woman who had spent the first six hours of labor making jokes about her husband's face and who was now past the joking stage and into the quiet, focused work of getting her daughter into the world.
I had my hand on the small of her back. Her contraction peaked. I breathed with her through it, the steady count that I could do in my sleep, the voice I used when a woman needed to hear someone say you're almost there and believe it.
"Good," I said. "That's good. You're right where you need to be."
She nodded against the pillow. Her mother shifted in the chair.
The nausea came up without warning.
The smell in the room—the iron-warm scent of a body in active labor, the disinfectant underneath, the coffee someone had left on the counter by the door—hit me all at once, and my stomach turned over with a speed and conviction that left no room for the story I'd been telling myself for three weeks.
I swallowed it, kept my hand on Mrs. Okafor's back, and tried to keep my breathing even. I kept my face in the position it needed to be in, because the woman under my hand was in her ninth hour and her body was doing the hardest thing it would ever do. I wasn’t going to take that from her by being the nurse who flinched.
The nausea passed. It took about thirty seconds. I noted it alongside the tenderness, fatigue, and missed period, and went back to work.
Mrs. Okafor delivered at four-seventeen.
Her daughter came out screaming—the particular, furious announcement of a person arriving in the world and having an opinion about it.
Her mother stood up from the chair and put both hands over her mouth.
Her husband, who had been holding Mrs. Okafor's hand for the last two hours with the rigid calm of a man using every ounce of his self-control not to fall apart, sat down on the floor.
I placed the baby on her mother's chest. Mrs. Okafor looked at her daughter's face and said something in Yoruba that I didn't understand.
I cleaned up. I charted. I stepped into the hallway with the clipboard and stood at the nurses' station with my pen moving across the form, and the math hit me.
My last period was the week before the wedding.
Nine weeks ago. I was on the pill, but I'd missed two days during the rehearsal weekend—Thursday and Friday, the days the schedule had eaten alive, the days I changed in Astrid's bathroom and drove to the bungalow at four in the morning and slept three hours and started again.
I knew what two missed pills could do. I'd explained it to patients a hundred times.
I'd said the words with confidence and clarity, because the words were true, and the truth had never been about me before.
Five weeks late. Sore breasts. Fatigue that didn't match my hours. Nausea triggered by a smell I'd been breathing for six years without flinching.
I set the pen down on the chart.
I knew.
My body had been sending me the answer in a language I spoke fluently, and I'd been refusing to translate it because translating it meant becoming a woman I'd never planned to be.
"Callahan." Lin, from the station two doors down, leaned past the counter with a chart in her hand. "You okay? You look like you're about to pass out."
"I'm fine. Long shift."
"What are you, pregnant?" She said it the same as every L&D nurse said it to every other L&D nurse—the joke that lived on the floor, the automatic punchline for any woman who looked tired, sick, or emotional in a building where all three were professional requirements.
She was already turning back to her chart.
The strangled sound that came out of me was not a word. I swallowed it before it reached Lin's ears.