Chapter 7 #2
So I keep scanning photos. I keep my secret. And I tell myself I’m not hiding—I’m just finishing something important before the ground shifts beneath me again. The way it always does.
“You’re making excuses,” Jules says.
It’s Wednesday night. I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed with the laptop open, a half-scanned photo of Mimz in bell-bottoms glowing on the screen. Jules is on speaker. Hope is on the line too, because apparently my emotional crises now require a quorum.
“I’m not making excuses,” I say, carefully peeling a Polaroid off the back of another print. “I’m prioritizing.”
“Prioritizing what?” Hope asks gently. Hope is always gentle. Even when she’s about to gut you with the truth. Especially then.
“The slideshow. Their anniversary party is in two days. I want to finish it before—”
“Before you tell the father of your child that he’s the father of your child?” Jules cuts in. “Yeah, that’s an excuse, babe.”
“It’s not an excuse. It’s a timeline.”
“It’s a timeline designed to delay the one conversation you actually need to have.”
I don’t answer. I peel the Polaroid free and hold it up to the lamplight. Mimz and Pops at what looks like a county fair. She’s holding a stuffed bear. He’s looking at her instead of the camera.
“Cora.” Hope’s voice is careful. The way she sounds when she’s choosing her words like they’re stones she’s placing across a river, one at a time, making sure each one is steady before she puts weight on it. “What are you actually afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“You’re terrified,” Jules says flatly.
“I’m cautious.”
“You’re living in the same house as this man. You’re carrying his baby. And you’re what—hoping he just won’t notice when you start showing?”
“I already have a belly, so I don’t think you can tell if I’m showing. It feels different to the touch, but he’s obviously not touching me.”
“You told me yesterday your jeans don’t button.”
“They button. They just... protest.”
“Cora.”
I close my eyes. The Polaroid is still in my hand. I can feel the waxy surface of it against my fingertips.
“If I tell him,” I say quietly, “he’s going to want me gone.”
Silence on the line.
“You don’t know that,” Hope says.
“I know how it looks, Hope. Single girl with no family, no real ties, shows up in a small town and moves in with two elderly people? And oh, by the way, she’s pregnant by their grandson?
” I let out a breath that tastes bitter.
“How do you think it looks when I add and I’m having your grandson’s baby to the equation? ”
“It looks like the truth,” Hope says.
“The truth doesn’t matter when the optics are this bad.”
“Since when do you care about optics?” Jules asks.
“Since I found something I don’t want to lose!” The words come out louder than I intend. Sharper. They hang in the air of my little room—the good guest room, the one with the rain showerhead, the one Mimz gave me without hesitation.
I press my fingers to my eyes.
“I like it here, Jules. I like this house. I like this town. I like that Pops leaves me the crossword every morning with the easy ones already filled in because he thinks I don’t notice.
I like that Mimz texts me pictures of the ocean even though I told her I’m fine.
I like that the third floorboard from the kitchen creaks, and I know it, and I step on it anyway because it sounds like—”
I stop.
Home.
It sounds like home.
“It sounds like what?” Hope asks softly.
“Nothing.” I swallow. “The point is, I want to finish this slideshow. I want to give them something beautiful for their anniversary. And then... then I’ll tell him. When Mimz and Pops are back. When there are other people in the house. When I have witnesses.”
“You don’t need witnesses, Cora. You need courage.”
“Courage and witnesses aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Jules sighs. Long and heavy. The sigh of a woman who has loved me through every bad decision I’ve ever made and is watching me make another one in slow motion.
“One week,” she says.
“What?”
“I’m giving you a week. Mimz and Pops get back, you finish the slideshow, y’all have your anniversary party, and then you tell him. If you haven’t told him by then, Hope and I are driving down there and doing it for you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.” A pause. “We love you, Cora. But this man has a right to know. And you know that, which is why you feel guilty, which is why you’re burying yourself in a photo project at ten o’clock at night instead of walking down the hall and knocking on his door.”
I look at the thin strip of light glowing under my closed door.
Down that hallway, behind another closed door, Oliver is doing whatever Oliver does in the evenings.
I heard him come in an hour ago. The microwave had hummed.
Two minutes. The plate I’d left—tonight it was pot roast, because I’d found Mimz’s recipe and I’d had a craving and I’d made enough for four people even though there are only two of us—was probably empty by now. Washed. In the rack.
He’s right there.
Thirty feet and one conversation away from knowing everything.
“One week,” I say.
“And not a day more,” Hope adds.
I nod, even though they can’t see me.
“Okay.”
We hang up.
I sit in the quiet for a long time. The house breathes around me. The old bones of it settling, the way houses do at night. The refrigerator hums in the kitchen. A branch taps the window in a rhythm that’s almost like knocking.
I pick up the next photo from the box.
It’s Mimz and Pops at what looks like a hospital. She’s in a bed, exhausted, hair plastered to her forehead. He’s sitting on the edge of the mattress, leaning close, and cradled between them is a baby.
Their first child.
Their first moment as parents.
His hand is on the baby’s head, so large it covers nearly the entire skull. And she’s looking at him—not at the baby, at him—with an expression that says look what we made. Look what we did.
On the back of the photo, in Mimz’s penciled handwriting, is the name James. I stare at it for a long time. James is Oliver’s dad.
I set it gently on the scanner, close the lid, and watch the light sweep across.
Later. Much later. After midnight.
I’m in the kitchen getting water—the baby demands hydration at unreasonable hours, apparently—when I hear his door open.
I freeze with my glass under the faucet.
Footsteps. The bathroom. The faucet running.
Then footsteps again. But they don’t go back to his room.
They come down the hallway.
I should move. I should go back to my room. I should not be standing here in an oversized T-shirt that barely covers my thighs with my hair in a mess and my hand on my stomach the way I’ve started doing without thinking, that unconscious protective gesture I can’t seem to stop.
I pull my hand away from my belly. Fast. Guilty.
He rounds the corner.
We both stop.
He’s in a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants.
Which, let’s be honest, is a criminal combination on a man built like him.
His hair is mussed from the pillow, those dark curls going in every direction.
Without the boots, without the jeans, without the cowboy armor, he looks younger.
Softer. More like the man who’d laughed in the green neon light of that bar and less like the one who’d accused me of tracking him across Texas. For his money.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
We stand there. The faucet drips.
“Water,” I say, holding up my glass like evidence.
“Same.” He moves to the cabinet. He knows which one, of course, he does. He pulls down a glass and fills it at the sink. We stand side by side in the dark kitchen, drinking water at midnight like two strangers in a hostel.
Except we’re not strangers. That’s the problem.
We know exactly one version of each other—the version that exists in a sealed truck cab on a rainy night with the windows fogged and the world shut out.
A night punctuated by the sounds of pleasure and skin slapping against skin.
And now we’re trying to pretend that version doesn’t determine every single interaction we have in this house.
“Pot roast was good,” he says.
“Mimz’s recipe.”
“I know. I recognized it.”
A beat.
“She used to make it on Sundays,” he says.
“After church. The whole house would smell like it.” He’s looking at the glass in his hands, not at me, and his voice has that late-night quality, a little lower, less guarded, like the darkness gives him permission to say things the daylight wouldn’t allow. “I haven’t had it in years.”
My chest aches.
“I can make it again,” I hear myself say. “If you want.”
He looks at me then. In the dark kitchen. With the moonlight coming through the window above the sink and the dripping faucet keeping time.
He looks at me the way he looked at me that first night. Like he’s trying to figure out all my secrets.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I’d like that.”
We stand there for one more moment.
Then I say, “Goodnight, Oliver.”
And he says, “Goodnight, Cora.”
And I walk back to my room and close the door and press my back against it and put both hands on my stomach and breathe.
One week, I tell myself.
One week and then the truth. And then he and the rest of his family will likely hate me.
But standing in the dark, I am not thinking about the truth. I’m thinking about the way he said I’d like that. Three words. Simple. Quiet. The kind of thing that doesn’t mean anything and means everything.
I’m thinking about the way he washes his plate every night.
I’m thinking about pot roast on Sundays, a baby in a hospital photo, and two people who loved each other for fifty years and counting.
I’m thinking that temporary used to be the safest word I knew, and now it just sounds like the saddest.
I press my forehead against the door.
“One week,” I whisper.
The tiny life inside my uterus offers no comment.
But I swear—I swear—I feel something flutter. Light and quick, like wings. Like the smallest possible answer to a question I haven’t figured out how to ask yet.
What if I stayed? What if he let me stay?
I push off the door, climb into bed, pull the covers up, and close my eyes. I shut my mind out so I don’t try and answer my own question.
Some doors you don’t open until you’re ready to walk through them.
And I’m not ready yet.
But I’m closer than I was yesterday.
And that terrifies me more than anything.