16. Edda
Chapter sixteen
Edda
The nausea hit at six in the morning again.
Same as yesterday. Same as the day before. My body had started keeping its own schedule, and I was no longer invited to negotiate it.
I made it to the bathroom in time, dropped to my knees on the cold tile, and waited it out, palms braced against the edge of the toilet like that could steady anything beyond me.
Crackers helped. I kept a sleeve of saltines on the back of the toilet now, which felt absurd and entirely practical at the same time. I ate three slowly, letting the salt cut through the lingering burn in my throat before I tried to stand.
Five days since I closed the shop.
In the mirror above the sink, I looked the same. Freckles scattered across cheeks that had gone a little too hollow. My father’s brow was permanently set into a line that made people assume I was always halfway to angry.
But my eyes did not match the rest of me anymore.
Something had shifted there. Not dramatic. Not visible to anyone who didn’t already know me well enough to notice my absence.
I couldn’t name it yet. I just knew it stayed.
I pulled on jeans and a flannel that still carried faint machine oil and went downstairs.
The shop felt wrong without sound.
No whir of the truing stand. No clatter of tools. No bell over the door announcing Mrs. Petrova before she even started complaining about her grandson’s brakes.
Just morning light spilling through the front windows and dust drifting through it as it had nowhere else to go.
The Schwinn I had been working on before everything stopped sat on the repair stand. Half-finished. Waiting. The chain hung slack. The derailleur still needed fine adjustment, simple work, the kind of work my hands used to finish without thought.
I didn’t touch it.
Instead, I made coffee in the cramped kitchen behind the register, black with one sugar, and carried it to the front window.
Outside, the street was waking up.
The franchise coffee shop to my left was already open, neon humming against the morning haze. The smoothie place on my right would follow soon enough. Between them, my shop sat dark and still, CLOSED sign pressed to the glass like it had decided to stay there.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
I didn’t look at it.
It had been doing that for days now.
Mrs. Petrova, twice. A grad student whose thesis defense was coming up too fast and whose bike I had promised would be ready by Friday. Marcus, once, a message I deleted without reading.
And Bennett.
Bennett had called four times in the first two days.
Then stopped.
The silence after he stopped was worse than the calls.
I took a sip of coffee and watched a woman in running gear pass the window. Breath visible in the November air. She didn’t look toward the shop.
Why would she?
It looked like what it had become, not what it had been.
A prop. A set piece in someone else’s story.:::
The article was still open on my laptop, the browser tab I could not bring myself to close. I had read it seventeen times now. I could recite the worst parts from memory.
"Sources confirm that Rowley's supposed consulting work for Thornhill Development was manufactured to legitimize a romantic narrative designed to neutralize political opposition."
"When reached for comment, City Council Member Diana Cassel stated: This was never about preservation. It was about manipulation. Ms. Rowley was paid to perform a role, and the citizens of this city deserve to know the truth."
Paid to perform a role.
I set my coffee down harder than I meant to. The ceramic clicked against the counter, too sharp in the quiet.
The heritage designation was real. I had filed it myself, with my own lawyer, before my name was ever tied publicly to Bennett.
The consulting work was real, too. Every invoice, every site assessment, every hour spent crawling through the Brennan Building documenting original fixtures and structural concerns. Real. Earned. Mine.
But the article did not care about any of that. It cared about borrowed dresses, gala appearances, and the way Bennett had looked at me across crowded rooms, as if that alone proved everything had been staged.
The irony sat bitter on my tongue.
It had started as a transaction. That part was true. Cassel had just sharpened it into something uglier, something easier to sell. Because the best lies always start close enough to the truth to feel safe.
We had signed a contract. I had taken the money. I had stood beside him in rooms that were never meant for me, wearing clothes that were not mine, smiling until my face ached under camera lights.
What the article did not know, what no one knew except Bennett and me and maybe Marcus, was that somewhere in the middle of all that performance, it had stopped feeling like performance.
And then I told him I was pregnant.
He had asked if I had considered my options.
I had walked out of his building and cried in the lobby for ninety seconds. After that, I did not let myself feel anything about him.
Until now.
Now I stood in my closed shop, watching the street through glass that needed cleaning, coffee cooling in my hands, feeling everything I had kept locked down for five days finally pressing back through.
Anger came first. It always did. Anger at Cassel for turning something real into something disposable.
Anger at Bennett for the way he had gone careful and distant in that office, retreating into terms and agreements when I had needed something human.
Anger at myself for expecting anything else, for forgetting the first rule I learned at twenty years old, sleeping behind this counter. Do not need anyone who can leave.
But underneath it, something else moved.
Quieter. Sharper.
I missed him.
I missed the way he poured my coffee first without thinking.
The way he had held the ladder in the Catskills was like it was instinct, not obligation.
The way his hand had hovered near his pocket in that diner, as he might reach for the medal he kept as if it weighed more than metal, then stopped when he realized I was watching.
I missed the man who had stood in my shop, put a vinyl record on like he belonged there, and said flatly, as if it were simply true, You built it back.
That man felt far away now.
The phone buzzed again. I did not look at it immediately this time.
Lina: Opening the shop today? I can bring lunch.
I stared at the message a moment, then typed back.
Maybe. Crackers first.
The three dots appeared, then: “Prenatal vitamins in my bag. Coming by at noon, whether you open or not.”
I almost smiled. Almost.
The morning broke itself into small, measurable pieces, like I could control it if I kept counting.
At eight o’clock, sunlight cleared the building across the street and spilled into the display case where the restored 1970s Peugeot sat like a quiet promise my father had left behind.
At nine o’clock, the coffee shop next door hit its first rush, and the sidewalk filled with people who never slowed down long enough to notice the shop.
At ten o’clock, I ate crackers that tasted like nothing and drank coffee that had long gone cold, then stood behind the register staring at the jar on the counter.
The someday jar.
Half full of coins and folded bills. Tips rounded up by customers who probably forgot they’d given them. Spare change I added on better weeks, like I was bribing the future to behave.
A strip of masking tape wrapped around the glass still read: SOMEDAY.
I never defined it. That was the point. If I never named it, it could stay flexible. Expansion. The empty unit next door. A life that didn’t involve calculating every repair down to the last cent or lying awake at three in the morning deciding whether the roof could wait another season.
Someday was supposed to arrive on my terms.
My hand drifted to my stomach before I could stop it. I held it there longer than I meant to.
Nothing visible yet. Nothing anyone else would notice. But I felt it anyway, quiet and undeniable. Something was already rearranging the edges of everything I thought I was building.
Someday suddenly felt less like a plan and more like a question I hadn’t agreed to answer.
At eleven, I unlocked the front door.
I didn’t turn the sign. I didn’t switch on the overhead lights. I just let the lock give way, like I was conceding something small but permanent.
Then I went to the workbench, picked up the wrench I’d abandoned five days ago, and pulled the Schwinn into place.
The derailleur needed a new cable. The housing was frayed in two places. The shift kept sticking in third gear.
Simple problems. Clean fixes. The kind of work that lets your hands stay busy while your mind tries to stay quiet.
Mine didn’t cooperate.
It kept circling back to the same thought, refusing to let go.
Bennett’s face in his office, shifting through expressions he didn’t quite catch before they slipped away. The flatness that followed. His careful voice asked if I had considered my options.
I’d wanted him to reach for me. I’d wanted something human, something that admitted what we’d done wasn’t just an inconvenient complication.
Something that acknowledged the truth we both pretended not to name.
That the thing growing inside me was his, too.
We had made it together in the back hallway of this shop, vinyl low in the background, bicycle frames hanging around us like silent witnesses, his mouth at my throat as he told me I was the only problem he couldn’t solve.
Instead, he had turned it into something clean. Manageable. Like a contract that needed restructuring.
So I left. I didn’t look back.
Walking out didn’t stop the part of me that kept waiting for him to follow.
The cable snapped into place with a clean click. I tested the derailleur, moving through the gears and listening for the smooth shift from one to the next. The Schwinn was almost ready.
The bell above the door chimed.
I looked up, expecting Lina an hour early, and found Mrs. Petrova instead.