5. Arielle
ARIELLE
Chicago in late September is doing the thing it always does, where summer pretends it's leaving and then sneaks back in for one more humid week to remind everyone it can.
I'm on the third floor of an old textile warehouse on West Lake, standing on a temporary platform that was definitely permitted but probably shouldn't have been, marking up a beam schedule with a red pen while my project manager argues on the phone with a structural engineer who wants to charge us for a callback we already paid for.
"He's gaslighting you, Terry," I say, without looking up. "Pull the change order. The signed one. The one with his initials in blue ink, not the scan."
Terry mouths thank you and walks off toward the freight elevator, already digging in his folder.
“It’s been eight weeks since Miami. I’ve spent five of them pretending I don’t know what day of my cycle it is, two of them noticing my body has started arguing with me about coffee after fifteen years of cooperation, and the last one ignoring the way my bra has decided it no longer recognizes its job description.
I’ve been in Chicago, on this site, in this building, in this exact spot on this scaffolding, every weekday for nearly two months, drafting and redrafting the southern parcel revisions for a project that no longer belongs to the developer I originally signed with, because someone named Ashford Urban Development swept in and bought the entire corridor in late August like they were picking up staples. ”
I have not let myself think his name in full once. I think Ashford the way I'd think contractor, and then I move on, and then I redraft the elevation for the third time this week because I keep noticing places where my line weights are softer than they should be.
"Ari." Bianca's voice cuts up through the open stairwell, and then she appears at the top of the stairs in a fitted leather jacket that has no business on a construction site, sunglasses pushed up into her braids, the caramel highlights catching the overheads.
"You said one hour. You said one hour an hour ago. I'm hungry, and you promised me Greek."
"Five minutes."
"You said five minutes thirty minutes ago, too."
"Then I lied. Five more minutes."
She crosses the floor in heeled boots that have no business on a slab this dusty and stops at the base of my platform, hands planted on her hips.
My cousin has been managing my social life by force since we were old enough to walk, and at twenty-eight she has perfected the Bianca Sutton stare that says she loves me and will bury me in the yard.
"You look like death," she says. "Polite death. Polite, well-dressed death. Death with a really nice ponytail."
"Charming."
"I'm serious. You're gray. When was the last time you ate something that wasn't almonds?"
"Yesterday."
"Yesterday what? Yesterday a sandwich? Yesterday a granola bar? Yesterday the idea of food?"
I open my mouth to lie to her — efficiently, professionally, the way I lie to clients about timelines — and instead the platform tilts sideways under me.
Not the platform. Me. The platform is fine.
I am the one tilting. The red pen drops out of my hand and rolls toward the edge, and I watch it roll for half a second too long before I realize my hands have gone cold and my mouth has filled with that thin, bright spit your body makes right before it decides to embarrass you in public.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Bianca is up the two steps before I've registered her moving. "Sit. Sit, Ari, before you eat this concrete. Down. Head between your knees. I will physically push your head down if I have to and you know I will."
I sit at the platform’s edge, forehead to my wrist, breath dragging tight between my teeth.
"This is the third time this week," she says, low, kneeling in front of me.
"Don't look at me like that. I count. I have been counting.
You almost did this in the parking garage on Tuesday and you told me it was the lighting, which, Ari, the lighting in that garage has been bad for ten years and you have walked through it every day of those ten years and your body has never once staged a sit-in. "
"It's a long week. The Ashford team keeps pulling me into reviews. I haven't been sleeping."
“You haven’t slept since Miami, and you came back from Miami acting like someone died.
Now you’re turning gray on a scaffold in front of God and the unionized iron workers, and I love you very much, and I’m about to ask you something — and you’re not lying to me about it, because I’m holding your hair. ”
"Bee."
"When was your last period?"
The freight elevator groans somewhere behind us.
A radio on the floor below is playing something with too much horn.
I keep my forehead against my wrist because I’ve spent eight weeks refusing to let that question into the room, and now it’s here, and my cousin is the one who opened the door for it, and in about four seconds I have to look at her.
"I don't know," I say, into my own arm. "I'm late. I'm — I don't know how late. I haven't been keeping track."
"Arielle Monique Sutton, you have kept track of your cycle on a color-coded spreadsheet since you were a junior in college."
"I deleted the spreadsheet."
"You what?"
"In August. After Miami. I deleted it because I didn't want to look at it. Don't say anything, Bianca, I swear to God."
She doesn't say anything. She just gets her arm under mine and gets me up off the platform, and she walks me down the temporary stairs and across the slab and out into the September afternoon, and she does not let go of my elbow the whole way to her car.
The Walgreens on Halsted is empty at two in the afternoon, which is a small mercy.
Bianca picks up three tests because she does not trust any one brand and because she has never in her life done one of anything when three would do, and she pays for them herself and hands me the bag like it's an envelope full of bad news from a lawyer.
I take all three in the bathroom of a coffee shop two doors down, because I refuse to do this at home where my own walls would have to watch it happen. Bianca stands on the other side of the door pretending to read a menu chalkboard, and she does not say anything, which is how I know she's scared.
All three are positive. The first one is the kind of pink you'd call coral if you were picking a paint chip. The second one is darker. The third one just says the word, in clean digital letters, like a verdict.
I sit on the closed lid of a coffee shop toilet for a full minute looking at three plastic sticks lined up on the back of the tank like little criminal exhibits, and I do not cry, because crying in a coffee shop bathroom is the kind of thing that ends up on someone's Instagram, and I have, since the age of sixteen, refused to give anyone that footage of me.
"Ari?" Bianca taps the door with one knuckle. "I'm not asking. I'm just — I'm here."
"I know you're here, Bee."
"Open the door."
I open the door. She doesn't look at the tests. She looks at my face, and she nods once, like a doctor confirming something she already suspected, and she takes the bag back from me and puts it in her purse and zips it like she's hiding evidence.
"Okay," she says. "Okay. We're going to my apartment. I'm calling Dr. Ellis's office on the way. You are not going to argue with me about this because I will fight you in this Starbucks and I will win."
Dr. Ellis can see me at eight the next morning.
Bianca knows her because Bianca knows everyone in this city worth knowing, and by 8:14 a.m. I am on an exam table with a paper drape across my lap, and Dr. Amara Ellis — soft locs, warm eyes, hands that don't rush — is looking at the screen of her ultrasound with the kind of quiet that medical professionals do when they're letting you catch up.
"You're about eight weeks along, Arielle. There's a heartbeat. It's steady. Strong, actually, for this stage."
I cannot make my mouth do anything for a second.
"I want to tell you something before you say anything," she says, setting the wand down and pulling her gloves off with a soft snap.
"You have options. All of them. You are healthy.
You are not high-risk. Whatever you decide, this office has you.
I'm not going to push you in any direction.
I'm going to ask you to take twenty-four hours before you say anything out loud you can't take back. Will you do that for me?"
"Twenty-four hours."
"That's it. One sleep on it. Eat something tonight. Drink water. Call somebody who loves you. Not the father, unless that's the right call for you. Somebody who already loves you. Then call my office in the morning and tell me what you want to do."
I do not call anybody who loves me. I sit in my apartment with the kitchen lights off and the river going dark through the window, and I drink ginger tea I do not want, and I think about my mother at twenty-six, alone in a hospital, naming me after a song she liked.
I think about the man in Miami who closed the drawer because I told him to.
I think about the rendering of the bakery, intact at the corner, and the way I drew the line weights heavier on the original brick because I have always, always deferred to the older building on principle.
By four a.m., the decision is made. Not out of courage. Out of the clean, unmistakable certainty that comes from watching my mother endure, and from knowing — in the same instinctive place my hands remember how to sketch — that this child belongs to me.
The other half of that decision arrives just as cleanly. I am not telling him. Not yet. Maybe not ever. A man like Nolan Ashford does not get told a thing like this by phone. A man like Nolan Ashford does not get to choose what my life looks like because he closed a drawer one time.
I will figure it out. I will figure all of it out. By myself, the way I figure everything out.
I call Dr. Ellis's office at eight on the dot.
"This is Arielle Sutton," I tell the receptionist. "I'd like to schedule my next appointment."