17. Maya #2
Jenny glanced back at her with a small, easy smile. “It’s okay,” she said. “It wasn’t great at the time, obviously. Turns out just because a guy is charming, doesn’t mean he’s boyfriend material.”
She nodded back toward the house. “I’m trying to help out around the house as much as I can but I’m terrible at this,” she admitted.
“I can run a team of twenty people and a six-month timeline, but I still have to check the back of the pasta packet every single time.” Jenny scrunched her nose.
“All my freelance work dried up once I started showing. I couldn’t even afford rent.
I don’t know what I’d have done without gramma and gramps.
I was so frightened. I hadn’t planned on getting pregnant. ”
Maya let out a faint breath that almost resembled a laugh.
“You’re… okay with it?” she asked.
“With the baby?” Jenny’s expression softened. “Yeah. I am.”
She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out a piece of paper. "I had an appointment this morning." She held it out.
Maya took it carefully. It was an ultrasound picture.
A grainy gray blur. She couldn't immediately make sense of what she was looking at.
"That's her head," Jenny said, pointing.
A baby. This was an image of an actual baby.
Jenny leaned closer, her shoulder brushing Maya's.
"I know this will sound crazy,” she said. "But I swear she's cute."
Maya laughed softly. Jenny's face changed as she looked at the picture.
"I already love her so much it's stupid," Jenny admitted.
Maya looked down at the ultrasound again.
Motherhood.
It had been coming, it was something they both wanted. She had thought she would turn to Reid one evening and say it's time and he would say yes because of course he would say yes.
Her thumb brushed the edge of the photograph.
That wasn't happening now.
She didn’t just miss her kitchen with its morning light, the quiet street, the neighbors who waved at her.
That would have been so much easier.
No, Maya also missed Reid.
The man who used to make her coffee every morning. The man who listened to her talk through the issues of the builds she was working on. The man whose rare smile felt like being let into a room no one else knew existed.
“Sometimes things fall apart in a way that feels like the end of everything,” Jenny said. “And then it turns out it’s just… a different start.”
The cover of the oldest notebook had a faint pencil mark running diagonally across it where she must have caught it against something years ago. Maya curled deeper beneath the covers and opened it.
The sketches were exactly as she expected—enthusiastic. Buildings that were impossible, structures that depended more on optimism than physics. There were annotations in the margins, half-formed ideas, arrows pointing to features she had been convinced were innovative.
Maya felt an unexpected smile tug at her mouth. She had been so young.
The drawings in the next notebook became more controlled. There were measurements now, attempts at scale.
In the next notebook, everything changed again. The buildings gave way to lists, terms. She’d drawn diagrams that had nothing to do with design and everything to do with the process of injury and recovery.
Medical notes.
She remembered those days too well. Sitting in rooms that smelled of disinfectant, listening to surgeons explain what had happened to Owen in their own technical language.
It was a language that she hadn’t know. She had written everything down.
Like if she could understand the words, the world would make sense.
She traced a finger over one of the terms. She had not understood, then, what any of it would mean for the rest of their lives.
She picked up another of her notebooks, opened it randomly.
The sketches here were not the big, impossible structures she had once dreamed up, but the unglamorous work of fixing what was already there. Adjusting. Compensating. Making spaces usable after the fact because no one had thought to make them usable from the beginning.
Ramps where there had once been steps, bathrooms reconfigured.
It mattered—of course it mattered.
She didn’t regret it.
You didn’t always get work from a blank page. You worked from what had already been built. You improved upon a foundation already laid.
Until the foundation you thought was solid crumbled beneath your feet.
The thought was unexpectedly painful. She took a shaky breath in.
No husband.
No marriage.
No one waiting for her at the end of the day. No quiet mornings, no shared routines, no future she could picture and believe in.
Her eyes moved back to the notebook in her hands, to the empty space at the end where the pages had been left unused.
No job.
No community.
Her future was a blank page. Just not the kind she’d dreamed of.
Her lawyer had advised her to plead guilty. Why not?
If she fought this, what exactly was she fighting for anymore?
The community already believed she stole from them.
The photographs of her arrest were out there. Her face, the handcuffs, Reid beside her in a suit and tie reading her rights.
A trial would not erase that.
Maya closed her eyes briefly.
If Reid had stood beside her, she could have survived the rest of it. If Reid had believed her, she would have fought until her last breath.
But he didn’t. And now he would divorce her.
If her own husband thought she was capable of it, what chance did she have against strangers?
She looked down at the empty pages again.
Blank future.
Blank life.
The plea deal would let her avoid prison. She could move somewhere new.
The thought made her feel physically sick. Because she did not want another life.
She wanted hers.
The room blurred suddenly around her and she swiped the tears away.
She was innocent.
And she was going to plead guilty anyway.
She just had to grow up and accept that was the way the world worked. She’d lived in a fairytale for long enough.
This was what she did. She made the best of things.