18. One Hundred and Eighty-Seven
Chapter eighteen
One Hundred and Eighty-Seven
NELLIE
Rewind: twelve hours.
I am four days late.
I've checked it against the cycle app. Checked it against the paper calendar on the fridge, the one with June's birthday circled in red. Checked it a third time standing in the kitchen doing nothing, staring at the wall like the wall's going to argue with me.
It doesn't argue. Four days is four days.
I have never once in my adult life been four days late. Not during finals week. Not the year Mama moved us twice in one August and I forgot to eat for three days straight. My body runs on rails. It's the one thing about me that's never once let me down.
There's one night that could do this.
One laughing, careless, neither of us was thinking straight night, two and a half weeks back, tangled up in my own sheets with his mouth on my throat and his hands everywhere and neither one of us stopping to be smart about it. I remember every second. I remember not caring.
I care now. God, do I care now.
My hands won't sit still. I catch myself pacing the kitchen, coffee mug in one hand, going nowhere, and I make myself stop.
Okay. Think like a nurse, not like a woman about to come apart in her own kitchen.
Two weeks is too early to trust a drugstore stick. I've watched enough scared eighteen-year-olds cry over a false negative because they tested too soon and believed it with their whole heart. I need the real answer, not a maybe.
There's a blood test that doesn't lie this early. Quantitative. And I know exactly where to get one drawn without half of Willowbend General learning my name by lunch.
***
Kerrville has a direct-access lab two exits off the highway, wedged between a tire shop and a Baptist church, the kind of place that draws blood for cash and doesn't ask why. No doctor's order required. I know because I've sent patients there myself.
Forty minutes each way. Ball cap pulled low. Sunglasses I don't need because it's overcast. Cash instead of my insurance card, because insurance leaves a paper trail and apparently, I am now the kind of woman who thinks about paper trails.
The tech ties off my arm like it's nothing. To her, it is nothing.
To me, the needle going in is the loudest thing that's ever happened to my body.
"Results usually post same day." She tapes the cotton ball down, not even looking at me. "Hour, hour and a half."
I sit in my truck in that parking lot, engine off, radio off, both hands wrapped around a coffee I never drink. I don't watch the clock. Watching the clock makes it worse.
My brain won't land anywhere and stay. It jumps. Owen's face at the auction, that spotlight swinging over. The porch, the ring on the chain, his shoulders shaking in the gray light.
Please be negative. Please please please be negative.
I don't even know which answer I'm praying for anymore.
***
The notification comes through while I'm still in the parking lot. Results available.
I've told a hundred patients not to read their labs alone in the car. I open it in the truck.
Mama's voice shows up uninvited, the way it always does when I'm scared. You're smarter than me, Nellie-girl. You won't end up stuck.
Shut up, Mama. Not now.
I open it.
Quantitative hCG, Serum: 187 mIU/mL. Reference range (non-pregnant): <5. Result: POSITIVE.
I read it twice. Then a third time, like the number's going to soften up if I stare at it long enough.
It doesn't. One hundred and eighty-seven isn't a maybe.
It isn't a borderline value some tech asks you to repeat in forty-eight hours to be safe.
It's a door slamming shut on every plan I never let myself make, and a whole new one flying open behind it before I'm ready for either.
My chest goes tight. Not the good kind of tight.
Pregnant. I'm pregnant. Owen's baby. Oh God.
I press a hand flat against my stomach without deciding to. It's instinct, the same gesture I've watched a hundred terrified women make from the other side of an exam table. I never understood it until right now, sitting in a gravel lot outside a lab in a town that isn't mine, alone.
Oh shit.
Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
No. No no no no no. I know better. I know BETTER. I'm a goddamn nurse, A hundred and eighty-seven.
I have taught contraception classes. I have stood in exam rooms and walked teenagers through exactly how this happens and exactly how you keep it from happening, and I know the failure rates cold, and none of those rates cover reached for the nightstand and let him hold my hand instead.
Thirty years old. I know better than any woman in this county how not to let this happen.
So what the hell is wrong with me.
My hands are shaking. When did my hands start shaking.
He can't know.
He can't know he can't know he cannot know. I watched him fall off a roof for me. I watched him shaking on that porch at dawn with a dead woman's ring in his fist, two years of grief still working its way out of him one nightmare at a time. He is barely standing.
And I'm supposed to hand him this? He'll go quiet again. Worse than the porch. He'll go so far inside himself I'll never get him back, and I will be the one who did that to him.
"Okay," I say out loud. To nobody. To the empty truck cab, to the steering wheel, to my own two hands that won't stop shaking. My voice comes out wrong, too high, not mine. "Okay. Okay. It's okay."
It is not okay. Nothing about this is okay. I say it anyway, again, again, because it's the only sound my mouth knows how to make right now and somebody has to say something or I'm going to come apart right here in this parking lot.
I ask the front desk for a printed copy before I leave the building. I couldn't tell you why. Maybe because a number on a phone screen still feels like something that could be a mix-up, and a piece of paper with a hospital letterhead on it does not.
They hand it to me in a plain white folder. COUNTY MEDICAL LABORATORY, blue block letters across the front, big enough to read from across a room.
***
I drive home with the folder on the passenger seat like it's a person riding shotgun.
I take it slow. Slower than I've ever driven that stretch of highway, both hands locked on the wheel at ten and two, because they won't hold still and I don't trust myself at fifty-five right now.
A truck rides my bumper for a mile before it swings around, horn blaring, and I don't even flinch.
I just keep breathing, in for four, hold for four, out for four, the way I tell my patients to when they're spiraling, and somewhere around mile marker nine it almost works.
Back at the cottage, I walk in, set it on the kitchen counter without thinking, and go straight for the bathroom because I need cold water on my face before my legs give out. I mean to come right back for it. I mean to hide it somewhere smart. My brain isn't handing out smart right now.
I splash water on my face. Blot it dry. Check the mirror.
I look exactly the same. That feels wrong. I look exactly the same and everything about my life came apart and put itself back together as something else entirely.
Get it together, Nellie. Nurse voice. Steady hands. You've told people worse news than this and kept your face still. You can keep your own face still.
I sit down at the kitchen table instead. My legs ask for it and I let them have it.
The shaking's slowed some. Not gone. Slowed enough that a thought can get a word in edgewise between all the panic.
And that's when it finds me. Quiet. Underneath everything else, where I can't see it coming in time to stop it.
I want this baby.
I go still.
Not someday. Not under different circumstances, better timing, a man who isn't carrying two years of grief around like a second skin. Now. This one. This exact impossible situation.
I press a hand flat against my stomach and it hits me for the second time today, except this time it doesn't feel like terror.
It feels like something turning over slow and warm underneath the fear, and it doesn't care about thirteen weeks and never renew and one box always packed.
All of it, gone quiet for one long second, because some part of me I didn't even know was still in there is already halfway to loving somebody the size of a lentil.
What is wrong with me. What is WRONG with me, wanting this.
I don't have an answer. I sit with my hand on my stomach at my own kitchen table and let both things be true at once, the terror and the want, because apparently that's what this is now.
Tell him. Don't tell him. Tell him tonight. Tell him never. He's finally starting to steady out, finally not falling apart in front of me, and I hand him this and what does it do? Does it wreck him or does it save him? I don't know. I don't know and I can't afford to guess wrong.
I think about the fire. Not the one in his eyes when he looked at me across that table at the tavern.
The real one, the one he told me about with his voice gone flat and far away, his own address coming over that radio.
A wife he couldn't get to in time. I am asking a man who lost everything to a fire he couldn't get to fast enough to somehow be ready for this, and I don't have the first idea if he can be.
Maybe I don't tell him yet. Maybe I need one more day to figure out how to say it without breaking him.
One more day. That's all I want. One quiet day to get my feet under me before the whole world tips sideways again.
I take one more breath and go to grab the folder off the counter.
***
The knock comes before I make it three steps.
Three raps, a pause, two more. Debbie Sue's knock. Nobody in Willowbend has a knock like Debbie Sue's.
"One second," I call, and my voice comes out fine. Steady. Nurse voice, right on cue.
I open the door.
She's already talking before it's all the way open, wine bottle in one hand, phone in the other, mid-sentence like she started this conversation somewhere down my driveway.
"—okay so first, Owen looks like somebody kicked his dog and left it out in the rain, and it's your fault, and I love it, and second—"
She breezes past me into the kitchen the way she always does, setting the wine bottle down on the counter without looking.
Her hand freezes an inch above it.
She stops talking mid-word.
I follow her eyes and there it is, right where I left it, right where her wine bottle almost landed on top of it. COUNTY MEDICAL LABORATORY in letters big enough to read from the doorway, big enough she didn't have to try.
I forgot it. I had one job, hide the folder, and I forgot the one folder.
Debbie's eyes come back to my face. Slow. Careful. The way you look at somebody when part of you already knows and the rest of you is praying you're wrong.
Neither of us says anything for a beat that lasts way too long.
Then Debbie Sue Monroe, wine bottle still in her hand, forgotten, whispers the only four words either of us has got left.
"Nellie Ann Greer."
Beat.
"No."