14. Edda
Chapter fourteen
Edda
The crackers taste like cardboard, and I eat them anyway, standing at the bathroom sink while my reflection does a poor impression of someone who has her life together.
Third morning in a row.
The nausea comes in waves now, predictable as rent day. I've started stashing saltines in every room of the apartment like some kind of apocalypse prepper for morning sickness.
Lina sits on the closed toilet lid, watching me with the same expression she wears when clients insist their torn rotator cuff is "just a little stiff."
"You look like death," she says.
"Thank you. Very helpful."
"I brought more crackers." She lifts a paper bag. "And ginger candies. And prenatal vitamins because I know you haven't bought them yet."
I have, actually.
They're sitting in my medicine cabinet, unopened. Because opening them would make this real in a way the positive test face down on my dresser still hasn't.
I finish the cracker and rinse the crumbs from my fingers, watching the water spiral down the drain.
"I'm keeping it."
The words settle between us.
First time I've said them out loud to anyone except the bathroom mirror.
Lina doesn't flinch.
"I know."
"You don't know. I just told you."
"Edda."
Lina rises from her chair. She's four inches shorter than me, yet somehow she still manages to look down her nose at me.
"You closed the shop early for the first time in six years. You haven't called Bennett in two weeks. You're eating crackers at seven in the morning and pretending you don't know why. I knew something was wrong the second you answered my text with a period instead of an exclamation point."
I open my mouth to argue, but she's right.
I've always been easy to read by anyone paying attention, and Lina has been paying attention since the block party three years ago, where she informed me, without introduction, that my bike needed new brake pads.
"I don't need him for this."
The words come out sharper than I mean them to. Something flickers across Lina's face.
"For the baby?"
"For any of it."
I snatch up a towel and scrub my hands dry.
"I've been doing this alone for eleven years. The shop, the taxes, the landlord, all of it. I don't need Bennett Thornhill showing up with his lawyers and contracts and ready-made solutions. I can handle this."
Before I can twist the towel into a knot, Lina plucks it from my hands.
"Nobody said you couldn't."
"Good."
"But handling it and wanting help aren't the same thing."
I brush past her and head for the stairs leading down to the shop.
The familiar scent of rubber and machine oil rises to meet me.
Then comes the memory.
Bennett is standing in this hallway.
His jacket is half off.
Music drifting from the record player.
The recollection lands hard enough to turn my stomach. Maybe it's the pregnancy. Maybe it isn't.
I shove the thought away before it can settle.
"I'm not having this conversation."
Lina follows me down. “You’re not actually talking to him. That’s the problem.”
The shop is dark, the closed sign still hanging in the window.
I have not opened in three days. Mrs. Petrova left a voicemail yesterday asking if I was sick.
I still have not called her back. The Schwinn I was working on before everything fell apart sits on the stand, half assembled, waiting for hands that have not been steady enough to finish it.
I flip on the lights. The fluorescents flicker twice before settling, washing everything in that harsh blue-white glow that makes the chrome frames look almost skeletal.
“I told him,” I say without turning around.
Lina stops in the doorway. “Told him what?”
“About the baby.”
The silence stretches so long I finally turn. Lina’s expression has gone carefully neutral, the way it does when she is holding something too sharp to touch immediately.
“And?”
“And he asked if I had considered my options.” The words land bitterly in my mouth, worse than the stale crackers from earlier. “In his boardroom voice. Like I was a contractor who had delivered a defective part.”
Lina exhales slowly. “Edda.”
“I do not want to talk about it.”
“You just did.”
“I told you what happened. I don’t want to analyze it.”
I grab a rag from the workbench and start wiping down tools I already cleaned earlier in the week. The motion gives my hands something to do, something that doesn’t involve thinking.
“He showed his hand. I saw it. That’s all I needed to know.”
Lina steps fully into the shop, setting a paper bag on the counter beside the someday jar. It’s half full again, coins and folded bills collecting years of what-ifs I’ve never touched. Spending it would make everything real in a way I am not ready for.
“What exactly did he say?” she asks.
“I told you.”
“You told me he asked about options. What else?”
My grip tightens around a wrench that is already clean. “He said it changes the terms of what we discussed. Like the baby was a clause in a contract that needed renegotiating.”
“And then?”
“And then I left.”
“You just left.”
“I told him it wasn’t a terms issue and I walked out.” The rag snags on a rough edge, and I pull it free harder than necessary. “What was I supposed to do, stand there while he ran numbers on fatherhood like it was a business decision?”
Lina doesn’t answer right away. The silence stretches, not uncomfortable, just heavy with her taking me in.
When she finally speaks, her voice softens. “You’ve been protecting yourself so long you don’t know how to do anything else.”
“That’s not fair.”
"It's not supposed to be fair. It's supposed to be true."
Lina hauls herself onto the counter, legs swinging like they’ve got nowhere urgent to be, like the world outside the shop isn’t doing what it always does. "You walked into his office, dropped a bomb, and left before he could react. You didn't give him time to be human."
"He had time. He used it to go full corporate."
"Thirty seconds," Lina says.
"It doesn't take thirty seconds to say, ' Are you okay instead of ' Have you considered your options." I shove the rag aside harder than I mean to. "He defaulted to management mode. That’s who he is. That’s always been who he is."
"That’s who he is when he’s scared."
That lands differently. Too clean. Too precise.
The shop feels quieter without the radio. Even the street noise outside seems muted, like it’s decided to give me room to think I didn’t ask for.
Just me, Lina, and the conversation I’ve been replaying until it’s worn thin in places.
"He's not scared," I say, but it comes out less certain than I want. "He's calculated. Every move is a chess piece. Every relationship is a transaction."
"And you're different?"
I don’t answer right away.
Instead, my mind drifts where it keeps drifting when I’m not careful. The contract I signed six weeks ago. The terms I shaped like I knew exactly what I was doing. The way I treated it like a negotiation instead of a line I might not know I crossed until I was already over it.
And then the hotel.
The way I called him out for turning people into problems to solve. The way I said it was like I was standing outside it.
I’m not sure I was.
"I'm not the one with two billion dollars and a legal team on speed dial," I say finally.
"No. You're the one with eleven years of walls and a habit of leaving before anyone can disappoint you," Lina says, hopping off the counter. "I'm not saying he handled it well. I'm saying you didn't give him a chance to handle it at all."
"I gave him exactly what he's given everyone else. A clean exit."
"And how's that working out for you?"
I don't answer.
The someday jar catches the light. My attention was stuck on it, on the coin I saw him drop when he thought I wasn't watching. On the way, he held the ladder without making it a thing, poured coffee as he belonged there, hummed a few bars of that song like it slipped out before he could stop it.
And then there was the medal. St. Christopher, worn close, thumb pressed to it like a reflex when something inside him went quiet and sharp at the edges. I remember how quickly I stored that detail away, as it might matter later. Like he might matter later.
"He hasn't called," I say. "Two weeks. Not once."
"Did you want him to?"
The question lands harder than it should.
Yes. No. It never settles into anything clean.
I wanted him to fight for it. I wanted him to respect my exit.
I wanted him to show up without turning everything into a problem to solve.
I wanted him to stop bringing money and lawyers and the quiet assumption that everything broken can be negotiated back into place.
I wanted distance, too. Space to think without him bending the edges of it just by existing in it.
"I wanted him to be different," I admit.
“Different how?”
“I don’t know.” I press my palms flat against the workbench, grounding myself in the worn wood and grease-stained familiarity of the shop.
“Different from the man who sat across from me in that conference room and asked about options. Different from every other man who’s ever looked at me and seen a problem to solve instead of a person to listen to. ”
Lina doesn’t respond right away. She just watches me for a beat, then reaches out and covers my hand with hers.
“You’re keeping the baby,” she says. Not a question. A line drawn in the sand.
“Yes.”
“And Bennett?”
“I don’t need him.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I pull my hand back. The nausea rolls in again, low and persistent, like my body is refusing to be ignored. A reminder that something irreversible is already happening inside me, whether I’m ready for it or not.
“I need to open the shop,” I say instead. “Mrs. Petrova’s grandson has a bike that needs a tune-up. I’ve been ignoring her calls.”
“Edda.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re pregnant and alone and acting like that’s the same thing as being strong.”
Lina grabs her bag. “I have clients in an hour, but I’m coming back tonight. We’re going to talk about this properly, and you’re going to eat something that isn’t crackers.”
“I don’t need you to take care of me.”
“No. But you’re going to let me anyway.” She pauses at the door. “That’s what people do, Edda. They let other people help.”
After she leaves, I stay in the shop for a long time, surrounded by frames and wheels and the familiar bite of chain oil, trying to sit inside a version of myself that feels steady.
The door stays closed. I don’t flip the sign.
I go to the workbench where the Schwinn is waiting and pick up a wrench. I try to work, but my hands won’t settle. The light feels off somehow, too sharp at the edges, and everything in this shop drags me back to him.
The night he put a record on without asking, as he belonged here.
The night he looked around and said I built it back like it was fact, not praise.
The night I pulled his jacket off his shoulders and stopped pretending I didn’t want him.
I set the wrench down.
The test is upstairs, face down on my dresser.
The prenatal vitamins are still in the medicine cabinet, unopened.
The contract is signed and finished. There is no structural reason for Bennett Thornhill to be anywhere in my life anymore, and somehow that truth lands less like freedom and more like something I wasn’t ready to lose.
My hand finds my phone before I can think better of it.
No new messages. No missed calls.
He asked about options. I walked out. And he let me go.
That’s the part I can’t stop circling back to. He let me go.
Maybe that’s who he is. Maybe that’s all he’s ever been, and everything else was me filling in the blanks with what I wanted to see.
Or maybe Lina is right. Maybe I left before he had the chance to show me anything else.
I put the phone in my pocket and look around the shop. Franchise storefronts on either side glare through my peripheral vision, all glass and polish and mass production, everything my father’s place never was.
For eleven years, I’ve held this ground. I’ve slept behind the counter, bargained with landlords who smiled like they were doing me a favor, and paid back taxes one month at a time. I’ve never asked for help I didn’t earn.
The baby changes none of that.
The baby changes everything.
My hand drifts to my stomach, still flat, no sign of what’s coming yet. My father’s face rises in my mind, the day he pressed the keys into my palm two weeks before he died, looking at me like I was the only thing he ever built that might outlast him.
I think of the nights on the shop floor when exhaustion blurred into sleep, the winter I sold my car just to keep the doors open, the spring I walked away from a bank loan because the terms felt like a trap dressed up as mercy.
And then I think of Bennett’s voice. You built it back.
Simple words. Quiet words. The kind that should not have stayed with me the way they did.
I don’t need him. That has always been the truth I can stand on.
But standing here in my father’s shop, tired in a way sleep does not fix, more alone than I’ve been in years, I start to wonder if need was ever the real question.
The door rattles.
Someone knocks.
I go still, pulse snapping sharp, because for one unguarded second I think it might be him.
The way he showed up four days after the contract ended.
Asking if I wanted lunch like it was the easiest question in the world.
Sitting in that vinyl booth for forty minutes, waiting like patience could substitute for words he didn’t know how to say.
But when I look through the glass, it is only a delivery driver with a package.
I sign for it, the motion automatic, like my hand knows what to do before I do. I take the box inside and set it on the counter.
The shop stays closed.
I sit on the floor beside the someday jar, the same way I did two weeks ago, with the test still in my hand, and I let myself sit with what it costs to want something I am not sure I can keep.