7. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The first week in Primrose taught me that grief lives in the body.
The farmhouse helped. Having work helped.
I threw myself into the work of making the place livable again, scrubbing floors and fixing leaky faucets and pulling weeds from the garden my grandmother had tended for forty years.
Physical labor, the kind that made my muscles ache and my mind go quiet, the kind that let me fall into bed exhausted every night.
But mornings were hard.
I’d wake up nauseous, my stomach rolling, and I’d lie there in the gray light and tell myself it was stress.
Grief. The aftershock of blowing up my entire life in a parking lot and driving eight hours to start over in a place I hadn’t lived since I was eighteen.
Of course my body was rebelling. Of course I felt sick.
June’s diner became my routine.
I’d found it on my second day in town, a little place on Main Street with red vinyl booths and a counter that seated eight and a bell over the door that chimed every time someone walked in.
June Hobbs ran it with the kind of quiet competence that reminded me of my grandmother, the kind that noticed everything and said nothing, and she’d started serving me breakfast every morning without asking what I wanted.
“You look like a woman who needs bacon and eggs,” she’d said that first morning, sliding a plate in front of me. “And coffee. Lots of coffee.”
I’d tried to pay her. She’d waved my money away. “You’re Ellie Smith’s granddaughter. Your money’s no good here until you’ve been in town at least a month.”
I hadn’t argued. I’d just eaten my bacon and eggs and let June refill my coffee and felt, for the first time in days, like maybe I could survive this.
But on the seventh morning, the eggs made me gag.
I made it to the bathroom just in time. The diner only had one, a single stall in the back with a lock that stuck and a mirror that needed resilvering, and I knelt on the tile floor and dry-heaved until my whole body shook.
Nothing came up. There was nothing to come up.
But my stomach kept clenching, kept trying to turn itself inside out, and I couldn’t make it stop.
A knock on the door.
“Honey?” June’s voice was soft. “You okay in there?”
“Fine.” The word came out strangled. “Just give me a minute.”
“I’m coming in.”
The lock clicked. I didn’t know how she’d done that from the outside, but suddenly June was there, crouching beside me on the bathroom floor, pressing a cold cloth to the back of my neck.
“That’s it.” Her hand was steady on my shoulder. “Just breathe. In through your nose, out through your mouth. That’s a girl.”
The nausea passed. Slowly, in waves, leaving me wrung out and shaky. I sat back against the wall and looked at June, at her weathered face and her knowing eyes and the ginger ale she was holding out to me like she’d been expecting this.
“Drink.” She pressed the bottle into my hands. “Small sips.”
I drank. The ginger burned going down, but it settled my stomach, took the edge off the rolling. June watched me, unreadable.
“My morning sickness was just as mean,” she said.
I froze.
“Threw up every day for sixteen weeks. Lost ten pounds before I started gaining it back. My husband thought I was dying. Men never understand the first trimester.”
“I’m not…” The denial stuck in my throat. “I can’t be.”
“When was your last period?”
I opened my mouth to answer and then stopped. I couldn’t remember, and the not-remembering was its own answer.
“Oh god.” My hands were shaking. “Oh god.”
June didn’t say anything. She just reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a small pink box and set it on the metal shelf beside the sink.
“Test’s been there for three days,” she said quietly. “Figured you’d need it eventually.”
I stared at the box. Early Response, the label said. Over 99% accurate.
“How did you know?” My voice sounded far away.
“I’ve been feeding you breakfast for a week. I’ve got eyes. And I raised two daughters, so I know what early pregnancy looks like even when the woman carrying it doesn’t want to see it.”
I picked up the box. My hands were trembling so hard I could barely open it.
“I’ll wait outside.” June stood up, brushing off her knees. “Take your time. And honey? Whatever it says, you’re going to be okay.”
The door closed behind her.
I sat there on the bathroom floor of June’s diner in Primrose, Texas, holding a pregnancy test in my shaking hands, doing the math I’d been refusing to do for weeks.
It would’ve been a couple of months before the bear, back when we still worked every call together, before the rosters changed and Sasha took my place.
We’d come home at dawn the way we used to, and he’d pulled me into bed, and we hadn’t used protection because we never used protection, and nothing had ever happened, and I’d stopped thinking about it.
But that was before.
Before he benched me. Before Sasha. Before the hospital and the parking lot and the past tense of his love.
I took the test.
The instructions said to wait three minutes. I watched the clock on my phone tick through each second, watched the little window where the lines would appear, watched my whole future hang in the balance of pink dye on a plastic stick.
Two lines.
Two pink lines, bright and clear and unmistakable.
I was pregnant.
I was pregnant, alone, thirty years old, a day’s drive from a husband who might not even know I was gone yet.
I was pregnant in the bathroom of a diner in a town I hadn’t lived in since high school, sitting on a tile floor that needed mopping, holding the evidence of a life that had started before everything ended.
The door opened.
June took one look at my face and pulled me up off the floor and into her arms. She smelled like bacon grease and coffee and a floral soap, and she held me while I shook, while the reality of it settled into my bones, while I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do.
“Come on.” Her voice was gentle. “Let’s get you some pie.”
The diner was empty. June must’ve flipped the sign to closed because the booths were deserted, the bell silent, the whole place quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator case. She sat me down at the counter and cut me a slice of apple pie and set it in front of me with a fork.
“Eat,” she said. “Babies don’t care if you’re having a crisis. They still need calories.”
I picked up the fork. Put it down. Picked it up again. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, that’s not true.” June poured herself a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter across from me. “You know exactly what to do. You just haven’t said it out loud yet.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you didn’t ask me what your options are. You didn’t ask me to find you a doctor who could take care of it. You haven’t said a single word about not wanting this baby. You’re just scared, and that’s different.”
I looked down at the pie. The crust was golden and flaky and I could smell the cinnamon, but my stomach lurched at the thought of eating.
“I’m keeping it.” The words came out hoarse. “That’s not the question.”
“Then what is?”
“Whether to tell him.”
June’s expression didn’t change. She just waited, patient, giving me space to work through it out loud.
“If I tell Hunt, he’ll come. He’ll drop everything and drive here and he’ll say all the right things and he’ll want to be a father and I’ll never know.
” My voice cracked. “I’ll never know if he’d have come for me.
Just me. Without the baby. I’ll never know if he wanted our marriage back or just wanted to do the right thing. ”
“And that matters to you.”
“It matters more than anything.” I pushed the pie away.
“I spent three years trying to be enough for him. Trying to be the wife he needed, the partner he wanted, the woman he chose. And every time I asked him to choose me, just me, he couldn’t do it.
He kept choosing work, choosing the unit, choosing her.
And now if I tell him about this baby, he’ll come running, but it won’t be for me.
It’ll be for the baby. And I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering if he ever really loved me at all. ”
June was quiet for a long moment.
“So you don’t tell him yet.”
“I don’t tell him yet. Not until I know what I want, and not until I’ve figured out if there’s anything left to save, or if I need to learn how to do this alone.”
“That’s a big decision to make by yourself.”
“I know.” I wrapped my arms around my stomach, around the life growing there that I couldn’t feel yet but somehow already loved. “But I’ve been making decisions by myself for months. Hunt just didn’t notice.”
June came around the counter and sat on the stool beside me. “You know Doc Hale is retiring next month.”
The change of subject startled me. “What?”
“Doc Hale. Town vet. Been here forty years, but his hands are getting too shaky for surgery. He’s been looking for someone to take over the practice.” She gave me a sidelong look. “Someone with large-animal experience. Someone who might be looking for a fresh start.”
I stared at her.
“Primrose needs a vet,” June said simply. “And it seems to me like Nora Smith needs to remember who she was before she was somebody’s second choice.”
Nora Smith. My maiden name. The name I’d used all through college and vet school, the name that had been on my first business cards, the name I’d set aside when I became Nora Anderson.
“I haven’t been Nora Smith in three years.”
“So? Names are just names. The question is who you want to be going forward. You can be the woman who ran away from a bad marriage, or you can be the woman who ran toward a better life. One of those stories ends with you crying in my bathroom every morning. The other one ends with you building a life you actually want.”
I thought about it. About the farmhouse that needed work, about the practice that needed a vet, about the baby that needed a mother who had her feet under her.
About staying here, in this town that had known me when I was just my grandmother’s granddaughter, before Hunt, before the unit, before any of it.
“I’d have to transfer my license.”
“That’s just paperwork.”
I kept going, piling up reasons it couldn’t work, half hoping one of them would stick. “And talk to Doc Hale about the practice.”
“He’s having lunch here tomorrow. I could introduce you.” June said it without looking up from the coffeepot.
“And find a doctor. An OB. Someone for the pregnancy.”
“Dr. Reyes, two towns over. She delivered both my girls. I’ll give you her number.”
I laughed despite myself. “You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?”
“Honey, I’ve been waiting for someone to take over that practice for two years. The minute you walked into my diner looking like a woman with a point to prove, I knew you were the one.” She patted my hand. “The baby’s just a bonus. Primrose could use some new blood.”
I looked around the diner. At the red vinyl booths and the lunch counter and the bell over the door.
At June’s face, weathered and kind and full of the same no-nonsense wisdom my grandmother used to have.
At the window that looked out on Main Street, on a town so small you could walk from one end to the other in ten minutes.
This could be home.
The thought settled into me like a seed finding soil. This could be home, this place I’d left when I was eighteen and never thought I’d come back to. This could be where I raised my baby. Where I built my practice. Where I became whoever Nora Smith was going to be now.
“Okay.” I picked up the fork and took a bite of pie. It was good. Really good. Sweet and tart and exactly what I needed. “Okay, let’s do it.”
June smiled. “That’s my girl.”
That night, I lay in my grandmother’s bed in the house I was learning to call my own.
The quilt was pulled up to my chin, the same quilt she’d made me when I turned eighteen, and I could still smell her in the fabric, lavender and camphor, the smell of the woman who had raised me when my parents couldn’t.
I was wearing one of Hunt’s flannels.
I’d packed it without deciding to, grabbed it from the closet in a handful of other things and thrown it in a box without looking at what I was taking. It was soft and worn and it still smelled like him, like woodsmoke and clean cotton, and I hated myself a little for wearing it.
But I did it anyway.
Because I was pregnant with his baby, and I was alone in a farmhouse that creaked in the wind, and I was terrified of what came next, and the smell of him was the only comfort I had.
I put my hand on my stomach.
“Hey there,” I whispered into the dark. “I don’t know if you can hear me yet. Probably not. You’re probably the size of a poppyseed, I’ll have to look it up. But I wanted you to know that I’m here. That I’m going to figure this out. That whatever happens with your dad, you’re going to be okay.”
The baby didn’t answer. Of course it didn’t. But somehow I felt less alone anyway.
I closed my eyes.
Tomorrow I’d meet Doc Hale. Tomorrow I’d call Dr. Reyes. Tomorrow I’d start building the life I’d told June I wanted, the life where I wasn’t somebody’s second choice.
But tonight, I let myself grieve.
For the marriage I’d thought I had, the husband I’d thought I knew, the version of this moment where he was beside me, where we were doing this together, where the two pink lines meant joy instead of complication.
Tonight, I wore his shirt and slept in my grandmother’s bed and let the darkness hold me.
Tomorrow, I’d be strong.