Chapter 31
Penny Correa POV
The exhaust fan in the ceiling of my Elm Street bathroom rattled in its rusted housing, a thin, vibrating drone that grated against the silence of the morning.
Outside the frosted transom glass, the January dawn was a flat, bruised gray, the Adirondack temperature holding at ten below zero.
The radiator beneath the copper pipe clanked once, then fell still, leaving the room smelling of cold porcelain, rubbing alcohol, and the sharp, minty foam of my toothpaste in the basin.
Thirty-five days remained until the ECAC Championship in Lake Placid.
I sat on the cold gray linoleum tile with my back pressed hard against the bathroom door, my knees pulled tightly to my chest. I wore a heavy charcoal flannel robe over gray sweatpants, my bare feet tucked beneath my thighs to keep them from freezing against the floor.
On the edge of the laminate sink counter three feet above my head, the white plastic digital stick lay flat.
Beside it, my phone rested face-up, the digital timer counting down the final seconds of the three-minute window in stark amber numbers: 00:24... 00:23...
My throat was parched, the metallic taste of copper coating the back of my tongue.
My mind was a chaotic, spinning ledger of numbers and dates.
Five weeks and four days since my last cycle on November 26.
Exactly twelve days late for the period that should have arrived over the holiday weekend.
I had bought the test after dark last night at the 24-hour pharmacy on Margaret Street, keeping my hood pulled low, paying in cash, hiding the small cardboard box deep in the pocket of my coat like a piece of contraband.
For two weeks, I had built a fortress of clinical rationalizations.
I had told myself the sudden morning nausea was gastroenteritis from the dining hall.
I had told myself the dizziness when I stood up from my desk was dehydration, that the bone-deep exhaustion was the inevitable cost of writing my Vanderveer Fellowship thesis while logging eighty hours in Subterranean Lab 04.
The timer hit ten seconds.
00:09... 00:08...
My heart was pounding with a violent, concussive force that rattled against my ribs like an iron bar against a cage. A cold prickle of sweat broke out along my hairline, my lungs seizing on short, ragged inhales.
My entire life—the clinical residency in Colorado, the forty-five-thousand-dollar stipend, the ten-year plan designed to pull me out of my father’s predatory shadow—hung on the tiny liquid crystal window sitting on the sink.
00:02... 00:01... 00:00.
The phone buzzed against the laminate, a short, abrasive vibration that sounded like a gunshot in the small room.
* * *
For five agonizing seconds, my body refused to move.
My hands were shaking violently as I pushed off the tile, my knees trembling beneath my sweatpants, my knuckles gripping the cold ceramic edge of the sink basin to haul myself upright.
The room pitched slightly to the left, a wave of lightheaded dizziness washing through my skull before my vision snapped into sharp, brutal focus.
I leaned over the counter.
In the small rectangular window of the plastic stick, the sand-timer icon had vanished.
In its place, spelled out in crisp, dark, digital pixels, was a single word:
PREGNANT.
The breath was knocked clean out of my lungs.
A sharp, choked gasp tore from my throat, my vision graying at the edges as my blood pressure plummeted. My knees gave way, my elbows locking hard against the rim of the basin to keep my body from crashing to the floor.
The high, thin ringing returned to my ears, deafening and absolute.
Five weeks and four days.
Conceived in the dark of his carriage house on December 10, while sixty-mile-per-hour winds threw snow against the casement glass and his rough, gravelly voice whispered that he would never let me go.
My right hand left the edge of the sink.
It moved slowly, trembling, guided by an ancient, instinctual gravity that bypassed every rational thought in my brain.
Beneath the thick charcoal flannel of my robe, beneath the cotton of my shirt, my palm pressed flat against the smooth, unyielding plane of my lower abdomen.
The skin beneath my hand was fever-hot.
The initial shock—the suffocating, blinding terror of ruined schedules and broken academic rules—cracked wide open.
Beneath the panic, a sudden, staggering wave of pure, ferocious devotion bloomed behind my breastbone, so vast and overwhelming it stole the strength from my legs.
It wasn't an abstraction. It wasn't a biological complication on a clinical chart.
It was our child.
The baby of the man who had knelt on the floor to rub the cold out of my feet. The baby of the enforcer who had put his massive body between me and the world, who had looked at me in the dark and called me his home.
A single, scalding tear broke over my lower eyelid, tracking hot down the curve of my cheek, dripping from the line of my jaw into the empty sink basin.
My fingers spread wide over my belly, pressing gently into the flesh, holding the life growing inside me with a fierce, quiet certainty that settled into my bones like iron.
I was terrified. I was nineteen days away from an ethics committee meeting that could strip my degree.
I was holding a miracle, and I would tear down anyone who tried to take it from me.
* * *
I straightened my spine, turning on the brass faucet.
I cupped my hands under the rushing stream, splashing freezing water onto my burning cheeks, scrubbing away the salt until my skin stung with the cold.
I grabbed a clean hand towel, patting my face dry, and looked into the mirror.
The pallor was gone from my face, replaced by a high, flushed color along my cheekbones. My hazel eyes were dark, steady, and blazing with a lethal, unyielding resolve.
I picked up the digital test.
I took a clean white linen handkerchief from the shelf, wrapped the plastic stick carefully in the cloth, and folded it into a neat, secure square.
I walked into the bedroom, unzipping the heavy black Garrison Athletics parka hanging on the back of the door. I slipped the wrapped test deep into the zippered interior breast pocket, right over my heart, pulling the metal teeth shut.
My mind flashed to Garrett Shaw sitting across from me in the library on Friday morning.
The glossy photographs of Justin holding my hips in Lab 04. The forged Green Bay compliance memo from Wade Kozak. Garrett’s sneering ultimatum demanding that I resign my clinical placement, pack my bags, and disappear before the puck dropped against St. Lawrence.
Garrett thought I was an easy target. He thought twenty-one years of poverty had made me weak, that I would run into the snow like a coward to save my own skin.
He didn't know who I was.
And he had no idea what was growing inside my body.
I was not leaving Garrison University. I was not resigning from Justin’s case, and I was not letting a jealous third-line winger destroy the father of my child.
I was going to The Forge right now.
I would walk down that subterranean tunnel before the pre-game skate. I would pull Justin into the private equipment bay, put his large, scarred hand over my belly, and tell him the truth.
We would face Dean Sterling together. We would face the Bruins together.
An iron front.
I pulled my heavy parka on, zipping the down jacket up to my chin, buttoning the draft flap securely over my abdomen. I grabbed my keys and my boots, shoved my gloves into my pockets, and pushed through the apartment door into the freezing Adirondack wind.
Thirty-five days remained until Lake Placid.
The ice was thick beneath my boots, and I was marching straight into the fire.