Chapter 6
Audrey
The parking lot at Hartsdale General was empty at six in the morning—a few overnight cars, a nurse's aide crossing to the far row with her keys out, the sky above the tree line going from black to the thin blue-gray that meant the sun was coming and didn't care whether I was ready for it.
I sat in my car with the engine off and three pregnancy tests in the chest pocket of my scrubs. I'd been sitting here for four minutes, deciding what to do next. Go home. Go to bed. Wake up later and pretend the staff bathroom hadn't happened.
I couldn't go home.
Going home meant sitting on my couch with nobody in the next room, and the silence in that apartment was going to eat me alive tonight.
I turned the key. I pulled out of the lot.
I was driving to Astrid's before I'd made a decision. I didn't know what I was going to say.
Astrid was the only person in my life who had never required me to perform.
Not once, in years of friendship, had she asked me to be the version of myself the room needed.
She took the version that showed up. She had taken the crying version, the angry version, and the version that showed up at her door with wine and a mouth full of complaints about a man she didn't name, and she had never once made me explain why I was there before she let me in.
I needed that. I needed to hand this to someone who would hold it without asking me to be okay first.
Easton's truck wasn't in the driveway. I noticed this as I pulled in and parked behind Astrid's car.
The house was quiet. The kitchen window was dark.
For one second, I sat in the driveway and thought about turning around, going home, dealing with this alone because alone was how I dealt with everything.
I got out of the car, walked up the porch steps, and knocked three times.
The porch light came on. Footsteps inside, the soft shuffle of a woman in socks on hardwood. The door opened.
Astrid was in a T-shirt and sleep shorts. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She had the look of a woman who'd been up long enough to make coffee but not long enough to drink it, and when she saw my face, the sleep left hers.
I didn't say anything.
I stepped through the door and put both arms around her neck.
"Audrey."
I couldn't answer. I'd been holding it through a twelve-hour shift, through Mrs. Okafor's labor, the nausea, and Lin's joke at the nurses' station, and the second Astrid's arms came around my back, the holding stopped working.
My body shook against her shoulder. The shaking that came before crying, when the thing you'd been carrying was too heavy to set down gently, and your hands were going to tremble on the way.
Moose came down the hall. He sat at our feet and pressed his shoulder against the back of my knee, warm and solid.
"Audrey, what's wrong?"
I pulled back. I could feel the wet along my lower lashes. I reached into my chest pocket and pulled out one of the tests. I held it out.
Astrid took it.
She looked at it. She looked at my face. I looked at the floor, because looking at her while she looked at the test was more than I could handle.
"Audrey. How long have you known?"
"An hour. I took it in the staff bathroom at the end of the shift. I took two more. They're all the same."
"Audrey."
"I haven't told him." My voice was steady. It surprised me. "I haven't told anyone, Astrid. I drove here from the parking lot."
She set the test on the side table by the door. She put her arms back around me, and I let her, and I put my forehead against her shoulder.
"It's okay," she said.
"Astrid."
"It's okay, Audrey. We're going to figure it out."
"You don't know that."
"I do."
I cried.
She moved me to the kitchen without letting go. Her arm stayed around my waist as we walked down the hall, sat me on the stool at the island, and then put the kettle on.
"Aud." Astrid was at the counter across from me, her hands flat on the surface. "Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to just sit here for a while?"
"I don't know."
"That's okay, too."
We sat. Astrid made me tea and pushed it across the island. I wrapped both hands around it.
I sat on the stool and let the tears run down my face, and didn't wipe them. Astrid didn't tell me to stop. She didn't hand me a tissue. She stood across the island from me and waited.
"I need you to promise me something," I said.
"Okay."
"You can't tell anyone. Not even Easton. Especially not Easton."
Astrid went still. Easton was Duke's best friend. If Easton knew, Duke would know by morning, and I wasn’t ready for that.
"Aud," she said. "Shouldn't you tell Duke?"
"Not yet. Maybe not ever. I don't know."
"He deserves to—"
"I know what he deserves, Astrid. I'm not ready."
She looked at me. She was running the math—the friendship with Duke, the marriage to Easton, the secret I was asking her to hold between them.
"Please," I said. "If he finds out now, it becomes his thing to have an opinion about, and I need it to be mine first. Just mine. For a little while."
Astrid looked at me for a long beat. Then she nodded.
"Okay," she said. "I won't say anything. I promise."
"Thank you."
I unlocked the door to my apartment, dropped my keys on the table by the entry, and stood in my kitchen. The coffeemaker was off. The candle on the counter I lit every evening was cold and unlit. Everything in this apartment was where I'd put it.
I was going to have a baby in this apartment.
The thought arrived complete, for the first time. A crib was going to go somewhere. The second bedroom—the one I used as a home office, the one with the desk, bookcase, and reading chair—was going to become a room with a purpose I hadn’t chosen.
I started the list. Prenatal appointment.
Vitamins. Insurance paperwork. The desk would have to go.
The bookcase could stay if I moved it to the wall by the window.
I'd need a crib, a changing table, and a small enough dresser for the closet.
My income was mine. My savings were mine.
I would figure this out by making a plan and executing it.
I walked to the bathroom to change.
The robe was on the back of the door. The silk one, cream-colored, the one I tied at my waist every morning I was home.
I'd been wearing it the morning Duke sat on the edge of my bed, and I told him it couldn't be a thing.
I'd tied it at my waist, sat across from him, and delivered the speech I'd built in the bathroom mirror. He’d said okay, and he’d looked at me, and I'd felt the small disappointed thing in my chest that had no right to be there.
I thought about it now. I stood in the bathroom doorway and looked at the robe and felt everything I'd been building for the last hour—the list, the logistics, the competence—come apart. Duke was the man I'd agreed to forget, and I'd not forgotten him, and I was carrying his child.
I sat down on the bathroom floor.
The tile was cold under my legs. I pulled my knees up, put my arms around them, and cried. I was scared. I was twenty-eight and pregnant by a man I'd slept with once and agreed never to see again. The life I'd built was about to change in a way I couldn't control.
I'd spent my whole adult life making sure I never ended up in a position where someone else's choice could reshape mine. None of it mattered now. A pregnancy was not a choice someone else had made. It was something my own body was doing, and my body didn't care about the architecture.
I wanted to call him.
I wanted to pick up my phone and hear his voice and tell him. I wanted the man who had read me at the table under the string lights, who had caught my elbow on the porch steps, who had said my real name against my temple in the dark. I wanted him here. On this bathroom floor. Sitting beside me.
I wasn’t going to call him. The pregnancy was mine. The decision was mine. When I told Duke—if I told Duke—it would be information, not an ask. I wouldn’t hand him the power to stay or leave and then wait to see which one he chose.
The crying slowed. I sat on the tile with my back against the tub until my breathing was steady and my face felt like my face again.
I was going to do this. Alone, if I had to.
I got up. I changed. I lay down on the couch, pulled the blanket over my shoulders, and closed my eyes.
I slept through the rest of the day.
"Sit," she said. "It's almost done."
The kitchen on Birch Hill smelled like eggs and herbs. The radio was on low, tuned to the station that played standards. My mother was at the stove in the apron she wore for cooking.
I sat and poured myself coffee from the pot on the counter.
The smell hit me wrong—a faint roll of nausea that I swallowed down before it reached my face.
Six weeks. The coffee aversion had started four days ago.
I took a sip anyway, because not drinking coffee at my mother's table on a Sunday was a tell that I wasn’t ready to give.
"How's work?" She slid the eggs onto a plate, brought it to the counter, and sat across from me.
"Busy. We're short-staffed this month. Lin went part-time."
She ate neatly, fork set down between bites. The blue plates were out. The linen napkins were folded in thirds.
"Will they replace her?"
"Eventually. In the meantime, I'm picking up the extra shifts."
"You work too much, Audrey."
"I work the right amount, Mom."
She gave me a look that started at my hair and ended at my hands.
"How’s The Yarn Room?" I asked.
She told me about the knit-along, the woman from Garrison who drove forty minutes for a hand-dyed merino, the cable stitch Marcie had talked her into teaching. I listened. I asked follow-ups. Underneath the listening, I was running the script.
I knew what she would say when she found out.
She wouldn’t yell. She wouldn’t cry, or not right away.
She would go still. Then she would ask questions.
Measured, careful questions. Who is the father?
How far along? Have you thought about what this means?
And underneath every question, the one she would never ask out loud: Are you going to end up like me?
She would hear "firefighter" and "coach's son" and map those words against the one she had been carrying since my father left—a charming man from outside the Callahan world who couldn't carry the weight of it and left.
I couldn't do that today. I wasn't strong enough yet. I needed the first trimester behind me. Twelve weeks—the rule I'd given a thousand patients. It was sound medical advice. It was also a wall, and I was building it between myself and the woman sitting across from me, and I knew it.
"The frittata is good, Mom."
"It's the gruyère. I switched from the Swiss."
"I can taste it. It's better."
She smiled and refilled my coffee without asking. Two hundred milligrams a day was the guideline. I was already past it, so I wrapped both hands around the mug and brought it to my lips without drinking.
"So," she said. She set her fork down and looked at me. Not the usual look—the one that started at my hair and ended at my hands. This one stopped at my plate.
"You're not eating."
"I'm eating, Mom. I had a big breakfast."
"You haven't touched the eggs."
I picked up my fork and took a bite. The nausea rolled through my stomach, but I chewed, swallowed, and smiled.
"See? Eating."
She watched me for another beat. Then she picked up her coffee.
"So," she said. "Anyone interesting lately?"
It came every Sunday. After the food and before the dishes.
"No, Mom."
"You'd tell me?"
"I'd tell you."
She nodded. She didn't push it.
We did the dishes together—her at the sink, me with the towel, the blue plates going back in the cabinet one at a time. My mother's hands in the water, my hands on the towel, the plates warm from the sink passing between us.
She hugged me at the door. She kissed the side of my head, slightly too hard, and pressed a Tupperware of leftover frittata into my hands.
"Drive safe," she said.
"I always do, Mom."
I hugged her back and held on for a beat longer than usual, and I felt her register it—the extra second that told her something she wasn't going to ask about today. She let me have it. She didn't ask.
I walked to my car, put the Tupperware on the passenger seat, and sat behind the wheel for a moment before I turned the key.
Six more weeks of this. The Sunday brunches, the coffee I couldn't drink, the questions I answered with the same answer I'd been giving for two years.
Six weeks of sitting across from my mother, carrying something that was going to change what she saw when she looked at me.
I was choosing the silence with my eyes open, and if that also meant I got six more Sundays without the weight of her patience on top of everything else, then that was a cost I was willing to pay.