Chapter 49 Eliana
ELIANA
double batch /?d?b?l baCH/: noun
The smell of coffee and bacon draws me down the hallway. I’m basically floating on my toes with my nose tethered to the aroma like a cartoon character. I’m just now realizing that I did not actually consume food yesterday, and I’m getting hangry.
I’m halfway to the kitchen and the promise of sweet, sweet calories—when fingers close around my wrist and yank me sideways.
“Wha—?!”
The bathroom door slams shut. Water blasts on. Both the sink and the tub faucet, from the sound of it, creating a wall of white noise that swallows my startled yelp.
“… Yas?” I recognize her deodorant, that jasmine-and-sandalwood all-natural blend she’s worn since college that never works as well as she claims it does. The tang of her scared sweat is detectable beneath it, too. “Yasmin, what the hell is going on?”
“We need to talk.” I can hardly hear her over the gushing water. “Privately.”
I reach for her hand and find it shaking.
That immediately sets off all my alarms. Yasmin does not shake.
Not when Brandon cornered her in her apartment.
Not when we fled Chicago with nothing but the clothes on our backs.
Not even she thought Zeke might die. My best friend is made of titanium, pad thai, and spite.
But right now, her fingers are trembling against mine like she’s standing in a snowstorm.
“Yas, sweetheart.” I clutch her fingers, trying to ground her. “You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
She takes a breath. More of a gasp, really.
Something’s wrong.
But despite the panic bubbling up in my stomach and throat like a backed-up garbage disposal, I wait.
It’s something I’ve learned about Yasmin over the years: When something really matters, she needs space to find her words.
Pushing only makes her clam up tighter. So I stand there in the accumulating steam and the white noise, holding her trembling hand, and let the silence go on, even though I want to shake her like a rag doll until whatever awful truth she’s hiding pops out.
“It’s just—” She stops. “I’ve been thinking about— The thing is—”
My stomach knots ever-tighter with each aborted sentence. Is this about Zeke? Did something happen while I was with my mother? Are the men planning something stupid and suicidal that they didn’t tell us about?
“Yas, whatever it is, just spit it—”
“I’m pregnant.”
My jaw flops open. All the panic bubbles go still.
“I found out yesterday,” she continues in a rush.
“I took, like, four tests because I didn’t believe the first three.
And I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you, but every time I opened my mouth, nothing came out—and then Bastian showed up not-dead and your mom was there and everything was so chaotic, and I just—” She sucks in a shuddering breath. “I didn’t know how to say it.”
For a second there, I can’t process what she’s saying. It just doesn’t compute. It’s a word in a foreign language.
Pregnant.
Preg-nant.
P-R-E-G-N-A-N-T.
From the Latin “praegnantem,” meaning “with child.”
But the word keeps circling around and around in my head like an airplane with nowhere to land. Is this a danger? A new crisis? How does Yasmin’s worrying aura here factor in? Yasmin is shaking, Yasmin is scared, Yasmin is—
Pregnant.
Yasmin is pregnant.
Oh. My. God.
The laugh rockets out of me, near-manic, but it’s so soaked in joy that I can’t even bear it. I’m a champagne bottle that got shaken up and the cork popped off. All the panic bubbles are happy bubbles now.
“You’re pregnant?!” I repeat, my voice climbing an octave into territory usually reserved for locking eyes with newborn puppies or communicating with submarines via sonar. “Yas, you’re pregnant?!”
My hands find her shoulders and yank her into a hug so fierce I nearly send us both tumbling into the half-full tub. The water’s still roaring, it’s hot enough in here for me to sweat bullets, but none of that matters because my best friend is having a baby.
I think about how she held me on the floor of that dingy apartment when I first learned about my own bun in the oven.
She never once made me feel alone, even when I was spiraling into worst-case scenarios and crying into cheap, itchy polyester carpet fibers.
And when push came to shove, she followed me across state lines without hesitation.
Now, it’s my turn to repay the favor of being the bright ray of optimism she needs to see her through this.
“Oh my God,” I breathe into her hair. “Oh my God, Yas.”
She’s not exactly reciprocating my joy, though. Her skin is cool and clammy to the touch despite the sweltering sauna she’s encased us in. She’s stiff in my arms, her breath coming in short, stuttery bursts that mean she’s about two seconds away from full-blown hyperventilation.
“I don’t know if I can do this, El,” she whispers.
“The timing is so fucked. We’re hiding from the actual, literal Russian mob.
I’ve been surviving on gas station Hot Cheetos and those gross taquitos that have been rotating under heat lamps for, like, decades.
I don’t have health insurance anymore. I don’t have anything anymore.
” She pulls back from me and sniffles. “What if something goes wrong? Or even worse, what if I’m not… what if I’m just not cut out for this?”
The spiral. Ah, my old friend. I know it so well I could map its exact dimensions. I’ve lived inside that tornado for weeks, convinced I was making the worst mistake of my life, certain the universe had picked the wrong person for this job.
I find her hands and flatten them against each other.
“Every single one of those fears is valid,” I tell her ferociously.
“And also, they’re all completely ridiculous.
You, Yasmin Kaur, are the most strong-willed, capable, independent, loving person I know.
If anyone can figure out how to be a mom while their life is on fire, it’s you. ”
The absurdity of it all crashes over me, and I start laughing again.
Halfway through a fresh round of guffaws, I hiccup and then burp back-to-back, which makes Yasmin laugh, which makes me laugh harder, until we’re both doubled over in the steam-filled bathroom, clutching each other as if we might float away like Charlie and his grandpa in the chocolate factory if we let go.
After a while, the giggle fit eases up enough for us to find seats on the edge of the tub, still holding hands.
“Yas,” I muse, “this is just so beautiful. Our kids are going to be practically the same age. They’ll grow up together.
We’re going to be those embarrassing moms who coordinate Halloween costumes and carpool to soccer practice and compare notes on which pediatricians are hot. It’s gonna be so good.”
The laughter turns slightly hysterical, edged with tears that slip down my cheeks and probably hers, too. Because imagining a future where any of that is possible—where there is a future, period—feels as impossible as it does fiendishly, desperately necessary.
“I fully intend on being a MILF,” she insists sternly. “Zeke better keep up the running routine, because there are no dad bods allowed in my house. Father figures only, you know what I mean?”
“Oh. Right. Zeke,” I say as the last of the laughter fades. “Have you…?”
She wipes her nose. “No, I haven’t told him yet.”
Again, I wait, sensing there’s more.
“It’s not that I think he’ll run,” she explains haltingly.
“That’s the problem, actually. He won’t run.
Hell, he’ll probably drop to one knee right there in the kitchen and propose with a Ring Pop.
” She exhales. “It’s just that I don’t want us to be together because of an accident.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if he stayed out of obligation instead of love. ”
I think about that for a minute. I meant what I told her a moment ago: She’s the most independent person I’ve ever met. She’s feisty and feminine, proud and powerful, and I love her to death for those things.
But if I’ve learned anything over the last weeks and months, it’s that sometimes, our greatest strengths are a result of fighting like hell every day to guard our greatest insecurities.
Sometimes, you gotta put down the claws and let someone pet you in the spots where you’ve been hurt before, so to speak.
“Yas,” I say slowly, “that man has been looking at you through heart-shaped eyes since the moment you two met. I’ve seen how he watches you when you’re not paying attention—like you hung the moon, painted the stars, and also maybe invented the margarita.
A baby isn’t going to change the fundamental truth of how Zeke feels about you. ”
She sniffles.
“But,” I add firmly, “you get to decide when and how to tell him. Not me, not him, not anyone else. Your timeline is the only one that matters here. You’re in charge, Mama.”
“Mama,” she repeats with a snort. “God, that sounds so freaking weird.”
“You’ll get used to it. It suits you.”
We sit there on the edge of the tub, two best friends, both carrying new lives inside us under maybe the most ridiculous circumstances that have ever been concocted.
Our paths to this moment have been so different.
Mine, an accidental pregnancy with a man I thought I’d lost forever, conceived on a rooftop under the stars.
Hers, on the lam from the mob with a man she’s still learning to let herself love, fighting the instinct to bolt before he can disappoint her.
But here we are. Side by side.
The way we’ve always been.
“You’re going to be an incredible mother, Yas,” I tell her.
She turns toward me and rests her forehead against my temple. “So are you, El.”
Neither of us fully believes it about ourselves. I can hear the doubt in her voice. I recognize it on sight, because it’s the same doubt that lives in my own chest.
But I believe it absolutely about her.
And I know she believes it about me.
“Yo!” Zeke’s voice carries through the door.
“What in the world kind of girl business requires you both to be locked in there with every faucet running full blast? You trying to flood the place?” When we don’t answer, he sighs.
“Fine, keep your secrets. You want more coffee or what? I’m gonna make another pot. ”
Yasmin tenses beside me. I smile, kiss her cheek, and then we rise from the tub’s edge together and turn off the faucets. The sudden silence feels almost deafening after all that rushing mayhem.
When we rejoin the crowded kitchen, Bastian appears at my side immediately and touches my hip. “You alright?” he murmurs in my ear.
“Yeah,” I say, squeezing his wrist reassuringly. “Better than ever.”
I let myself imagine it: two babies, two couples, endless Sunday morning breakfasts that don’t involve hiding from anyone. A future where the biggest drama is burnt bacon and whose turn it is to change diapers.
It’s a wild, reckless, dangerous hope.
I hold onto it anyway.