Chapter 26 Andrea
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Andrea
Mary found me on the bathroom floor.
I’d given her a spare key months ago for emergencies, and apparently five days of one-word texts qualified.
I heard the front door open, her voice calling my name, footsteps down the hall.
Then she was standing in the bathroom doorway with her jacket still on, purse over her shoulder, her face doing the thing it did when she was trying not to cry.
“Oh, honey.”
“I’m fine,” I said from the floor. My back was against the tub, my knees drawn up, the tile cold through my sweatpants. I’d thrown up twice already this morning and I didn’t have the energy to stand.
“You’re on the bathroom floor.”
“It’s a lifestyle choice.”
She crouched beside me, pushed my hair back from my face, pressed the back of her hand against my forehead. “You don’t have a fever.” She looked at the toilet, at my face, at the dark circles I could feel under my eyes without needing a mirror. “How long have you been throwing up?”
“A few days. A week maybe. I don’t know.”
“A week?”
“It’s stress. The whole... everything. I’m not sleeping, I’m barely eating, my body is just reacting.”
She sat down on the tile beside me, back against the tub, shoulder to shoulder. She didn’t say anything for a minute. Just sat with me, her arm warm against mine, the bathroom quiet around us except for the drip from the faucet I kept meaning to fix.
“Andrea,” she said carefully. “When was your last period?”
My brain stopped.
I stared at the bathroom wall. Counted backward in my head, past the rejection, past the hospital, past the birthday dinner, past the weeks of good.
Past the office, the elevator, the couch, the first time.
I counted and I kept counting and the number I arrived at made my stomach drop through the floor.
“I’m on the pill,” I said. “I’ve never missed a dose.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Mary.”
“When?”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t... I can’t remember exactly. Before. Before all of this. Weeks.”
She looked at me, and I knew she came to the same conclusion as I did. She squeezed my hand, got up, brushed off her jeans. “I’m going to the pharmacy. Stay here.”
“Where else would I go?”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
She came back with a plastic bag and pulled out two boxes because she was thorough like that. I took them into the bathroom and closed the door and my hands were shaking so badly I could barely open the packaging.
I sat on the edge of the tub afterward, waiting.
I could hear her in the other room, pacing, the soft creak of the floorboards going back and forth.
The minutes stretched. I stared at the shower curtain, at the grout between the tiles, at the crack in the ceiling I’d never noticed before.
Anywhere except the counter where the test was sitting.
I couldn’t look at it. If I looked and it was positive then everything changed again, everything that already changed was going to change more, and I’d just been rejected by a man who told me none of it was real, sitting in my bathroom in sweatpants I’d worn for three days, hair unwashed, eyes so swollen from crying they barely opened in the morning.
I was not equipped for this. I was barely equipped to brush my teeth.
“Mary,” I called.
She came in. Looked at the counter. Looked at the test. Her face went through several expressions stacking on top of each other, too fast for me to read, and then she looked at me.
“Congratulations,” she said softly.
I braced for devastation. For panic, for the floor dropping out the way it did when I read the magazine. I waited for the terror to hit.
It didn’t come.
What came instead was joy. Fierce, sudden, filling my chest so fast it pushed out everything else.
There was a baby inside me. My baby. Not his, not ours, mine.
I put my hand on my flat stomach and felt something shift behind my ribs, not the bond pain, not the grief, not the hollow ache that had taken up residence there.
This was new, warm, ferociously alive. It didn’t care about the magazine or the rejection or the man who said none of it was real.
It just existed, growing, already bigger than everything that was trying to crush me.
“Oh God,” I said, and I was laughing and crying at the same time, tears running down my face while my mouth couldn’t stop smiling. “Oh God, Mary.”
She was crying too. She sat on the tub edge beside me, arm around my shoulders. We stayed there laughing and crying while the faucet dripped and the test sat on the counter.
“I’m pregnant,” I said, because saying it made it real.
“You’re pregnant.”
“I’m going to be a mom.” The word felt enormous in my mouth.
Mom. My mother was a mom. My mother was a mom.
She smelled like lavender, sang off-key while she cooked, died on a highway when I was fifteen.
Now I was going to be one. The thought should have terrified me.
Instead it made me grip my stomach tighter, protective already, my body making decisions my brain hadn’t caught up to yet.
“You’re going to be the best mom.”
I pressed my hand harder against my stomach. The joy held. Underneath the chaos, underneath everything, it held. I was going to be a mother. Whatever else was broken, this wasn’t.
The decision came fast. I was leaving Atlanta.
“I can’t stay here,” I told Mary that afternoon, sitting on my couch with tea she’d made me, the curtains finally open, sunlight hitting surfaces that had been dark for days. “Everything in this city is him. The office, the streets, the shelter, this house. I can’t heal here.”
“Where will you go?”
“Whitebrook. My grandma.”
Mary nodded. Her eyes were wet but she didn’t argue, didn’t try to talk me out of it, just squeezed my hand. “When?”
“As soon as I can pack.”
It took two days. I started with the bedroom because the living room still smelled like him.
Folded clothes into suitcases, stripped the bed, packed the books I wanted to keep in a box I got from the hardware store next to Bonalisa.
The rest went into bags for donation. I worked fast because if I slowed down I’d start thinking about why I was packing, and I couldn’t afford to think right now. I could only move.
The hardest part was the porch. I stood there on the last morning with my coffee and looked at the spot where Fin used to lie beside me while I read, the exact plank of wood where his head used to rest, and my throat closed.
I’d sat here hundreds of nights, talking to a dog about my life, pouring out my secrets to a man in disguise.
The anger should have made it easier to leave.
It didn’t. I missed the dog. Hated the man.
Loved them both. The contradiction was exhausting.
The goodbye at Bonalisa nearly broke me.
I went on the last morning before my flight.
Mary and Peter were waiting by the front door, the hand-painted sign above them faded in the early light, the shelter tucked between the laundromat and the hardware store the same way it had been since the first day I walked in two years ago.
The animals first. I went through the kennels one by one, touching noses through the bars, scratching ears, saying goodbye to the ones I’d walked, fed, fostered, loved.
Then Buddy. The German Shepherd I’d fostered twice, the one who’d been so traumatized he wouldn’t let anyone near him when he first came in.
He pressed his head against my chest when I knelt beside him and I held him and cried into his fur.
“I’ll miss you,” I whispered. “Be good. Let someone adopt you. Let someone love you.”
Peter hugged me at the door. Tight, silent, his chin on top of my head because he was so much taller than me. Then Mary grabbed me so hard I couldn’t breathe, her arms locked around my shoulders, her face pressed against my neck.
“You call me. Every day. I mean it.”
“Every day.”
“And you eat something other than noodles.”
“I make no promises.”
She laughed, then cried, then laughed again. I memorized her face because I didn’t know when I’d see it next.
I called Hilda from the airport.
“Grandma, I’m coming home.”
She didn’t ask why. Didn’t ask what happened, didn’t ask about Finneas, didn’t ask about the job. She said, “I’ll make up your room. What time does your flight land?”
That was Hilda. No questions, no conditions, just the door open and the room ready.
The flight was two hours. I spent the first half with my forehead against the window, watching Atlanta shrink below me until the buildings became blocks and the blocks became patches of gray between green and then it was just clouds.
I was leaving the city where I’d lived for two years, worked for two years, fallen in love for two years.
The city where I’d become an adult, basically.
I was leaving with two suitcases, a box of books, a broken heart, and a baby I hadn’t told anyone about except Mary.
I put my hand on my stomach. Still flat, no sign that anything was different, but I knew. My body knew. The nausea was already easing, the morning sickness settling into a pattern I was learning to work around, and I found myself pressing my palm there every few minutes, checking, making sure.
The second half of the flight I let my brain go quiet.
Let the engine hum fill the space where the panic used to be.
I watched the clouds thin out as we dropped altitude toward Whitebrook, the mountains appearing below, green and familiar, and I felt something loosen in my chest. Not healing, not yet.
But the beginning of something that might eventually become healing if I gave it enough time.