Chapter 20 The Test With Two Lines
* * *
The third test sat on the edge of the marble sink, and Anya did not look at it right away.
She looked at the bathroom instead — the baroque opera house bathroom that she had never quite stopped being startled by, even after six months of living inside its enormous, ornamental life.
The ceiling was vaulted plasterwork the color of old ivory.
The fixtures were matte gold. Someone, at some point in the nineteenth century, had decided that even the private rooms of this building deserved to be taken seriously, and the result was that Anya Pemberton, twenty-five years old, one missed heartbeat from a complete collapse of her composure, was standing in a bathroom that felt more like a painting than a room.
The stick had two lines.
It had two lines the first time, at half past two in the afternoon, when she'd used the test she'd bought from the Apotheke in the village three weeks ago and never opened, tucking it into the back of the bathroom cabinet with the kind of strategic denial she was not proud of but recognized as survival instinct.
It had two lines the second time, at ten past four, after she'd driven the Citro?n into the market town and bought two more boxes from a different pharmacy and sat in the car park for eight minutes before coming home.
And now it was nearly seven o'clock, and the third test had been sitting on the sink for three minutes and twenty seconds, and it had two lines, and Anya was no longer surprised.
She picked it up. Looked at it directly, the way you look at something you know is going to change the shape of everything, and you want to have the precise memory of the moment before it does.
Two lines.
Her hand was completely steady. That surprised her.
She set the test down, washed her hands — slowly, methodically, the way her mother had taught her, twenty seconds at least, singing the first verse of something in your head — and dried them on the white linen hand towel, and then she stood there looking at herself in the mirror.
Her reflection looked like her. That was the first absurd thought.
She had expected to look different. Altered.
She looked the same: close-cropped natural hair she'd been growing out since spring, the small gold earrings her aunt had sent from Kingston for her birthday, the navy knit jumper she'd put on this morning because it was warm and she hadn't been thinking about what she looked like, only about whether she would be able to eat breakfast without her stomach staging a revolt.
She looked like herself. She looked like Anya Pemberton, who had stood in a Tube carriage fourteen months ago with cold coffee and no plan, and she looked like the woman who had walked into a house full of Cassian Sterling's careful silences and learned to live inside them, and she looked like a person who was, apparently, going to have a baby.
She turned off the bathroom light and walked out into the east corridor.
* * *
The east corridor of the opera house was her favourite place in the building at this hour.
She'd told Cassian that once — in the first weeks, when they were still learning each other's private habits, when she'd said it shyly, expecting him to find it inconsequential.
He hadn't. He'd asked her why, with the focused attention he gave to everything she said, as though her answers were data worth having, and she'd told him about the fresco.
The ceiling here ran the length of the corridor in one continuous tableau — figures in motion, richly coloured even under the low evening wall-sconces, gods and mortals tangled together in the kind of mythological drama that the baroque period had been utterly unable to resist. There was a woman near the east window, rendered in ochre and terracotta, who had always reminded Anya of someone she couldn't name.
She had an arm extended, fingers open, reaching toward something above the frame.
Whatever she was reaching for was outside the painting's edge.
Anya stopped beneath her now.
The fresco looked different tonight. That was the only way she could describe it — louder, somehow.
More present. As though the figures had shifted fractionally in her absence and were now paying close attention to what happened next.
The woman with the open hand seemed less like she was reaching than like she was offering.
Happy isn't a plan.
Her mother's voice, from three nights ago.
Not unkind — never unkind, her mother, even when she was being direct — but precise in the way that West Indian women of a certain generation could be precise, which was to say: completely.
They had spoken for forty minutes on the phone, her mother calling at an hour that suggested she'd been thinking about it for some time.
She'd said it in the context of Anya's future, of the lawsuit, of the particular precariousness of loving a man whose life moved at the speed of consequence.
Happiness isn't nothing, sweetheart, but it isn't a plan. You need to know what you're building.
Anya had said she knew.
She was less certain now what she'd meant.
She stood in the corridor for a moment longer, looking up at the woman in the fresco with her open hand, and then she walked to the library.
* * *
The library was dark when she got there — not completely, because the standing lamp in the far corner was on its lowest setting, casting a small amber circle that reached approximately nowhere useful. She turned on the second lamp, the one beside the left Chesterfield chair, and sat down.
The room smelled of old paper and the cedar oil that Cassian had the housekeeper work into the shelves once a month, and underneath both of those, very faintly, the ghost of whatever Cassian had been reading last week — she'd come in and found him here on Thursday evening, the amber light, the worn copy of A Room with a View face-down on the armrest, his socked feet on the footstool, looking utterly human in a way that still occasionally caught her off guard.
She sat in the left chair and put her hands in her lap and thought.
She thought about the child development book that had appeared on the kitchen counter eleven days ago.
She'd assumed it was for Juliette — research, the way Cassian researched everything, systematically and with a focus that was sometimes alarming in its intensity.
He had read four books about child psychology in the first month after meeting his daughter.
He'd bought a colour-coded notebook and actually used it.
The development book had a library sticker on the spine and a Post-it note on the chapter about early attachment patterns, and she had picked it up while making tea one morning and then put it down carefully and not mentioned it because she did not want to make him self-conscious about the learning.
He was trying so hard. It was one of the things that made her love him in a way she hadn't quite expected — not the grand gestures, not the watch, not the night he'd walked away from a deal worth more than most countries' GDP, but this: the colour-coded notebook.
The library book. The way he showed up to things he didn't know how to do and did them badly and kept going.
She thought about Juliette.
She thought specifically about Juliette at the kitchen table in the Swiss Jura, three weeks ago, drawing a purple horse named Bernard.
The horse had six legs — Juliette had explained, with the calm authority of a four-year-old who understood her own artistic vision, that Bernard needed extra legs for speed — and the colour had gone well outside the lines of the horse's body, spreading in cheerful purple arcs across the paper.
Juliette had looked up at Anya at one point and said, in her particular mixture of French and careful English, le cheval aime la musique — the horse likes music — and then gone back to her drawing as though this were information Anya clearly needed and had now been provided with.
Cassian had been standing at the kitchen window when it happened, his back to the room, and Anya had watched his shoulders shift. Just fractionally. The particular movement she'd learned to recognise as the thing he did when something hit him in the chest and he hadn't prepared for it.
A purple horse named Bernard who liked music.
He was going to lose his mind, Anya thought, when she told him.
The thought arrived so cleanly, so specifically — when she told him, not if, not how on earth do I approach this — that she sat with it for a moment, blinking.
She hadn't noticed herself decide. She hadn't felt the decision forming.
But there it was, fully assembled, sitting in her chest alongside something that was warm and slightly terrifying and not entirely unlike the feeling she'd had in the mountain refuge in the Alps, when Cassian had laughed — actually laughed, helplessly, with his whole face — and she'd understood that she was in serious trouble.
She was going to tell him. She had known that since the first test. What she was doing here, alone in the library in the amber lamplight, was not deciding. She was feeling.
She gave herself permission to do that.
She thought about the woman she had been fourteen months ago.
Cold coffee on the Tube, the Tube carriage juddering between Stockwell and London Bridge, the particular weight of a graduate degree she'd never used and a bakery she couldn't save and a future that felt like a hallway with no doors.
She had been so careful then — so relentlessly, exhaustingly careful.
Keeping herself small. Keeping her expectations smaller.
Counting her money on Sunday evenings and calculating how many weeks before a missed paycheck became a crisis, and the answer was always: not many.
She had been building her entire adult life on a foundation of managed fear, and she had not known another way.