Two Lines

Dess

The women's restroom on the fourth floor of Narragansett Mutual had three stalls, one working hand dryer, and a motivational poster over the sinks that said PROTECTING WHAT MATTERS MOST, over a photograph of a golden retriever asleep on a porch swing. Dess had looked at that dog every working day for six years. She had never hated it until this particular Thursday at ten past nine, when she stood in front of it with a plastic stick in her fist and a paper towel under her elbow and the clock on her phone counting down three minutes with the cheerful indifference of a microwave.

She had decided, around two in the morning, that she would not take the test at home.

It was a good decision, and she was proud of it. At home, she would have done it alone in her own bathroom, in her own socks, and then sat on the edge of her own tub and stared at the result until it either was or was not real, with nobody to see her face. At work, there was a limit on how badly she could behave. At work she had to fix her mascara and go to the nine-thirty. It was, she thought, a form of structural support, the way a good insurance policy is: you buy it for the day you're going to need to be stopped from doing something stupid.

Also, said the voice in her head, the dry one, the one that had narrated her life since the third grade, you wanted to know before you saw Peg. Because if the answer is yes, you will have to look at Peg and not tell her. And if the answer is no, you will have to look at Peg and not cry. And you have a deep, well-documented need to prepare for both.

"Shut up," said Dess to the golden retriever.

The retriever slept on.

Two minutes, forty seconds.

She had been counting days since the sixteenth of September. Twenty-nine days, to be precise, and she was precise, it was her whole personality; they paid her to be. Twenty-nine days of not drinking wine at Joelle's birthday and saying she was on antibiotics. Twenty-nine days of googling implantation cramping vs period cramping at three in the morning with the brightness turned all the way down, as though the internet might notice. Twenty-nine days of eating saltines at her desk and telling Gabe it was a protein thing.

Last month she'd taken a test on day fourteen, and it had said NOT PREGNANT in small clinical capitals, and she had put it in the trash, and gone to work, and done a very thorough job on a hull-damage claim for a thirty-eight-foot Hatteras that had been backed into a piling by its owner's father-in-law. She had been fine. She had been completely fine, until six that evening, when she had gotten into her car in the parking garage and found that she couldn't remember how to start it.

That was in August. This was October.

She was fine now.

One minute, fifty.

She was going to be fine either way. She had made a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had a tab called If Yes and a tab called If No, and the If No tab had a very robust plan involving a third cycle in January and a conversation with her bank about a personal loan, and it had a footnote that said You will survive this, it is only money and eggs. She'd put the footnote in last week, when she was tired.

Someone came into the restroom.

Dess flinched so hard she dropped the paper towel. She whipped the test behind her back like a teenager caught with a cigarette, and a woman in a gray pantsuit from Underwriting gave her a bright, vacant, professional smile, said, "Morning!" in the tone of someone who didn't want to hear the answer, and went into the middle stall.

"Morning," said Dess, to the golden retriever. Her voice came out two notes too high.

She waited for the stall door to lock. Then she brought the test around in front of her and looked at it.

There was a window on the stick. In the window, there was a line.

One line.

Control, said the part of her that read instructions. That's the control line. That means the test works.

She watched it.

Nothing happened. The plastic sat in her hand like a very small, very stupid gravestone. Dess felt her chest go still, then slowly hollow, as though somebody had put a straw into her and drawn out the air. Okay, she thought. Okay. Fine. That's January, then. That's the third cycle. That's the loan. That's—

And then, as she was about to put it down on the edge of the sink, a second line came up.

It didn't arrive all at once. It came the way a photograph used to come up in a tray: first a faint rosy ghost of a mark, like a thumbprint on a window, and then, line by line, darker, until it sat beside the first one, shy and a little crooked, and perfectly, unmistakably there.

Dess stood completely still.

In the middle stall, the woman from Underwriting flushed. The hand dryer groaned into life in the corner, ran for four seconds, and died, as it did every day, with a cough. The golden retriever slept. Somewhere beyond the wall, in the long gray corridor of cubicles, a phone began to ring and ring and ring.

Two lines, thought Dess.

She turned the stick over, read the back, turned it again, and held it up to the fluorescent light with her arm fully extended, like a woman trying to read a menu without her glasses. The second line stayed where it was.

"Oh," she said, to nobody. "Oh, you're—"

The stall door opened. The woman from Underwriting came out and washed her hands with the vigor of a surgeon, and glanced at Dess in the mirror, and glanced at the stick, and then, with the grace of someone who had once been through exactly this, looked away so completely that she seemed to have left the room.

"Congratulations," she said to the soap dispenser, very quietly.

She dried her hands on her skirt, because the dryer was dead again, and walked out.

The door sighed shut behind her.

Dess put the test down on the edge of the sink, and put both hands on the cold porcelain, and bent her head, and laughed until it turned into the other thing.

It lasted maybe a minute. It wasn't pretty. She wiped her face with a paper towel that smelled like the inside of a filing cabinet. She blew her nose. She looked at herself in the mirror, in the flat white light, at the green sweater and the smeared eyeliner and the face of a thirty-year-old woman with a very wet nose, and thought: Hello. You look terrible. You look like somebody who's just been given the keys.

She took out her phone, and photographed the stick, and sent it to Joelle with no message at all.

The answer came eleven seconds later.

Joelle: DESS

Joelle: DESS DESS DESS DESS

Joelle: I'M AT WORK I AM IN A PATIENT'S ROOM I JUST SCREAMED IN FRONT OF A WOMAN IN ACTIVE LABOR

Joelle: she says congratulations

Joelle: CALL ME THE SECOND YOU CAN

Dess typed, with a thumb that wouldn't quite hold still: Is it real? Tell me it's real. Look at the line. Is it too faint? Does faint mean something? I read that faint can mean a chemical pregnancy.

Joelle: Odessa Marie Rourke

Joelle: a line is a line

Joelle: you are pregnant. you are a pregnant person. we do a blood test on Friday and I will personally drive you and hold your hand and bully the phlebotomist

Joelle: now breathe and go to your meeting and call me at lunch and DON'T google

Dess breathed. In. Out. She counted it, as she'd been taught, to four.

Then she dried her face, fixed her mascara with the corner of a tissue, put the stick into the zippered pocket of her bag between the Advil and the emergency granola bar, and went out into the hallway to go and be a person.

…

"You look weird," said Gabe.

He said it without looking up, which was how Gabe said most things. Gabe Lindqvist was twenty-eight, six foot three, built like an unmade bed, and had the sleepy, unbothered, golden-brown look of a man who had been raised near a lake and had never quite recovered. He sat in the cubicle across from Dess's, and he had sat there for two years, and in that time he had brought her coffee every morning with a regularity so unremarkable that she had stopped noticing it was a kindness.

He slid the cup across the divider now. It was in her hand before she'd realized she'd reached for it.

"Thanks," she said. "I look the same."

"You look like you've been crying in a bathroom."

"I have not been crying."

"Okay."

"I had something in my eye."

"For ten minutes?"

"It was a persistent something."

Gabe finally turned his chair. He studied her for a moment through the thick bangs that were, as ever, three weeks overdue for a cut, and then glanced pointedly at the cup in her hand. "That's decaf," he said.

Dess stared at it.

"I've been giving you decaf for two weeks," said Gabe. "You haven't noticed. Which, for a woman who once sent back a cortado because the milk was too confident, is either a medical emergency or a very specific kind of news."

"Gabe."

"I'm not asking. I'm saying I've been giving you decaf for two weeks, and nobody's complained. That's all."

She opened her mouth. She closed it. She found, to her horror, that her eyes had begun to sting again, and she took a long, steadying sip of coffee, and said, as evenly as she could, "I don't know what you think you know."

"I don't know anything. I'm a claims adjuster. I know about water damage and I know about people who say it was already like that."

"It was already like that, in the case of the Hatteras."

"The Hatteras was a disgrace, and so was his father-in-law." Gabe leaned his elbow on the divider and rested his chin in his palm. "Dess. Listen. I'm going to tell you three things, and then I'm going to go back to my email and pretend I'm a man with no emotions. Okay?"

"This is a very strange way to start a Thursday."

"One. If it's good news, then I'm happy for you, and I'll bring you whatever you want to eat until the end of time, including the weird pickles."

"I don't want the weird pickles."

"Two. If it's bad news, then I'm sorry, and I'll bring you the pickles anyway. And three—" He hesitated, scratching the back of his neck, and for the first time his voice lost some of its lazy gloss. "Three, you're the best person I work with. I'm just saying. I know you don't like to be looked after. I know you do everything the hard way, on purpose, so nobody can say they helped. But I'm not going to say anything to anyone. And if you need somebody to cover for you at a doctor's appointment, or whatever, you can just say I need to be out, and I'll say sure. No questions. That's the whole deal."

It was a lot to carry before ten in the morning.

Dess set the cup carefully on the corner of her desk, so it wouldn't spill. Her hands, she noticed, were not entirely steady.

"I'm not going to tell you what it is," she said.

"Great."

"I'm not saying it's anything."

"Understood."

"But if it were, hypothetically—" She cleared her throat. "If it were something, I would probably need to be out on a Friday at, say, seven forty-five. And I'd probably be a bit annoying about it. Possibly for a long time."

"I can do annoying," said Gabe. "I've worked with Peg for two years."

"I heard that," said a voice from the end of the row.

Peg Alvarez was sixty, five foot nothing, and wore her reading glasses on a chain with the air of a woman who had personally defeated three reorganizations and an audit. She came down the aisle in sensible shoes with a stack of files against her chest and stopped at Dess's cubicle, and looked from Dess to Gabe to the cup of decaf on the corner of the desk, and an expression crossed her face that was entirely too knowing.

"Rourke," she said. "My office. Nine-thirty. Bring the Pendleton file."

"Yes, Peg."

"And take a breath, would you? You're the color of a boiled shrimp."

She went on down the aisle. Dess sat motionless, listening to her footsteps recede.

"She knows," whispered Gabe.

"She doesn't know. Nobody knows. There's nothing to know."

"She's known since the Hatteras. Peg knows everything. She knew about my divorce before I did."

"You were never married."

"That's how good she is," said Gabe.

…

"Okay," said Joelle, at 12:41, in the car, in the parking lot of a Dunkin' Donuts on Dyer Street, with the engine running and a French cruller in each hand. "Okay. Okay. I need you to tell me everything. Every detail. Start with the line. Which line came up first? How fast? How dark? Was it a pink line or a blue line?"

"It was a pink line."

"Which brand?"

"The one with the little smiley face."

"Oh, thank God, not the one with the words. Those are terrible. They say 'Pregnant' in this little font and women lose their minds." Joelle handed her a cruller. "Eat. You're thin. You're going to be hungry all the time now, and you have to learn to listen to that. Did you cry?"

"A little."

"Good. You were supposed to cry. It's very healthy. Did anyone see?"

"A woman from Underwriting."

"Did she say anything?"

"She said 'congratulations' to the soap dispenser."

"I love her," said Joelle with feeling. "I want to buy her a car." She took a bite of her own cruller, chewed it with her eyes closed, and sighed. She had slept maybe four hours since yesterday morning and still looked like a magazine ad for something expensive and good for the skin. "Dess. You're pregnant. You are pregnant. You have a person in you."

"Don't say it like that."

"A tiny little person!"

"It's the size of a poppy seed. It's practically a thought."

"It's a poppy seed with dreams. Okay. Okay, I'm going to be a professional now. Here's the plan." Joelle took a notebook out of the glove compartment, an actual spiral notebook with a cartoon cat on the cover, and turned to a fresh page. "Friday, seven forty-five, blood draw. I already called Quest, I know the girl. Then next week the first OB appointment, which I will book you with Dr. Pratt, because she's the best, and because she's the only one I trust not to make you feel like a statistic. Then—"

"Joelle."

"Then you're going to need prenatals, which I'll pick up, they have to be the right kind because the cheap ones make you constipated—"

"Joelle."

"—and a pregnancy pillow, and eventually a lawyer for the will, and—"

"Joelle, I haven't told my mother."

The pen stopped.

Joelle looked at her. Then she put down the notebook, and set her cruller on the dashboard, and turned all the way in her seat to face her, with one knee up and one hand resting on the back of Dess's headrest.

"When are you going to?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Do you want me to be there?"

"No. God, no. She'd cry, and you'd cry, and Ray would come in and offer us a beer." Dess rubbed her forehead. "I think I need to just—do it. Soon. Before I lose my nerve. Before it turns into one of those things where I'm lying to her every Sunday and it gets worse every time."

"You're not lying. You're waiting for the blood test."

"That's a technicality."

"Technicalities are my favorite kind of truth." Joelle squeezed her shoulder. "You don't have to do it today. You don't have to do it this month. You can wait until twelve weeks, like everybody else."

"I know."

"But?"

"But she's going to find out. Either from me, or from somebody who saw me in the grocery store with prenatal vitamins. And if it's the second one, she'll never forgive me. Not for the baby. For the part where she wasn't first." Dess turned the cruller over in her fingers. "She's not like other mothers, Jo. She's not the kind that gets angry. She's the kind that gets quiet, and then forgives you completely, and then brings it up every Christmas for the rest of your life, very gently, in a sweater."

Joelle snorted. "She does wear some great sweaters."

"It's a weapon."

"Call her."

"Now?"

"Why not now? I'm right here. I've got a cruller, I've got a half hour, I've got a tragic lack of sleep. If it goes badly, I can drive you to the casino and we can lose forty dollars at the slots out of spite."

Dess laughed. It broke in the middle.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'll call her."

"Atta girl."

"If she cries, you're allowed to honk."

"I will honk like a Canadian goose."

Dess picked up her phone.

…

Colleen Rourke picked up on the second ring.

"Dessie!" she said, warm and delighted, in the voice that always made Dess feel seven years old and simultaneously a hundred. "Oh, honey, I was just thinking about you! I had the funniest dream. You were in a big white house, and there was a horse in the kitchen, and you were making a casserole—"

"Hi, Mom."

"—and I said, 'Dessie, you don't cook,' and you said, 'It's for the baby, Mom,' and then you handed me this tiny little—" She stopped. There was a pause on the line. "Honey? Is everything all right? You sound funny."

Dess closed her eyes.

Of all the dreams in all the world.

"Mom," she said. "Are you somewhere you can sit down?"

"I'm at the cage. I'm on my break. I'm eating a yogurt." The background noise was the low electronic bell-and-chatter of the Foxwoods floor, the sound of ten thousand strangers hoping. "Why? Dessie, what is it? Is it your job? Is it—honey, did something happen? You're scaring me."

"No. Nothing bad. I just—I have something to tell you. It's good news. I think it's good news. I want it to be good news, and I'd really like it if you would let me get through the first part before you say anything."

Silence.

Then, slowly, very quietly, Colleen said, "You're pregnant."

Dess's mouth opened. No words came out of it.

"You're pregnant," said Colleen again. It wasn't a question. It was soft, and wondering, and dismayed all at once, like a woman who has found, under a stack of old mail, a letter she'd been dreading for years. "That's why you've been so—you didn't have wine at Joelle's birthday. And you've been so tired. I thought it was work. Oh, Dessie. Oh, honey. Who is he? Is it that boy from Charlotte? I told you he was a flake, I said it the first day, I said—"

"Mom. It's not—it's not a boy. It's not anyone. There's no he."

"I don't understand."

"I did it on my own. I went to a clinic. I did the whole thing, by myself, on purpose. I've been planning it for three years." She said it all in a rush, the way you pull off a bandage. "There's no father. There's no one to leave. I made the decision. I made it carefully. And I'm—Mom, I'm so happy. I'm so happy I can hardly breathe. I just wanted you to know before anyone else did."

There was a long silence on the line. In the background, someone won something. A machine played a triumphant little arpeggio.

Dess waited.

Joelle, in the driver's seat, watched her with enormous brown eyes and her hand hovering above the horn.

"Oh, honey," said Colleen at last. Her voice had gone thin and small and wet. "Oh, Dessie."

"Mom—"

"Wait. Please. I just need a minute." There was a muffled sound, a rustle, the sound of a hand going over a mouth. "I'm not—I'm not upset. I want you to know I'm not upset. I'm just—I'm trying to—"

"I know."

"You did it all by yourself?"

"Yes."

"You went in and sat down and signed the papers and picked—" Colleen's voice cracked. "Picked a stranger. Out of a catalog."

"It's not a catalog. It's—there's a profile. They answer questions. Mom, I really did choose carefully."

"I know you did. I know. You choose everything carefully." The words came out in a rush, half laughing, half sobbing. "You've never done anything by accident in your life. You alphabetized your Barbies, Dessie. You made a chart when you were nine to decide which shoes to get for school. I'm not worried you didn't think about it. I'm—" She drew a shuddering breath. "I'm worried you didn't think about me."

Dess went still.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, why didn't you ask?"

"Ask what?"

"Ask me! Tell me! Let me—" Colleen's voice caught. "Let me help you. I could have come with you. I could have sat in the waiting room. I could have driven you, or held your hand, or—I would have been there, Dessie. I'm your mother. I'd have been there for the whole thing. And instead I find out on a Thursday, over the phone, while I'm eating a yogurt, after you've done every last piece of it by yourself, like you didn't think I'd—" She broke off. "Like you thought I'd make it about me."

The words landed like a handful of cold pennies.

Dess pressed her forehead against the car window. The glass was cool and smelled faintly of Joelle's perfume. Outside, a man in a Dunkin' apron was smoking against the side of the building and watching the traffic with the dull serenity of the profoundly underpaid.

"I didn't think you'd make it about you," she said slowly.

"Then why?"

"Because I knew you'd want to fix it."

"Fix what?"

"Me. The plan. The—" She stopped, took a breath, started again, and said it as gently as she knew how. "Mom, when I was eleven, I watched you pack for Gary's apartment. And I watched you unpack. And I watched you pack again, in March. You were so brave. Every time. You walked right into the whole thing with your eyes open, and you gave them everything, and I loved you for it. I did. I just couldn't—" Her throat closed. "I couldn't be someone who had to wait for somebody to say yes. I couldn't stand in a doorway in slippers. I needed to do one thing in my life where nobody got to say no."

The line was quiet for so long that Dess thought they'd been disconnected.

Then, in a very small voice, Colleen said, "You were watching."

"I was always watching."

"I thought you were doing your homework."

"I was doing my homework. I was also watching."

A sound came down the line: half laugh, half sob, wholly Colleen. "You and your homework. You were such a serious child. I used to think, where did I get this little accountant? Who ordered her? And then you'd look at me with those big eyes like I was a bill that hadn't been paid, and I'd think, oh God, she knows. She knows exactly what we are."

"Mom. That's not—"

"No, honey. It's true. And you're right." The wet, shaky voice steadied. "You're right. I'm not good at being alone. I've never been good at it. I know that. I've known it since I was eighteen. But you can be a person who's bad at something and still love somebody. You can be both. Isn't that—isn't that what it is to be a mother?" She sniffled. "Isn't that what I'm for?"

Dess found that she couldn't speak.

"I'm not upset you did it alone," said Colleen. "I'm proud you did it alone. I'm so proud I could burst. I'm just—I'm sad that you thought you had to. I'm sad you thought nobody would be there. I would have been there, honey. Even if I cried. Even if I made a fuss and brought the wrong casserole. I'd have been there."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I do now."

"Good." A wet sniff. "Then it's all right. Then I forgive you. For the part where I wasn't first."

Dess nearly laughed. "How did you know about that part?"

"Because I'm your mother. I know what you're going to say before you say it. I just don't always know what to do about it." The line crackled. "Oh, Dessie. A baby. A little tiny baby. I'm going to be a grandmother. I'm going to need a haircut. I'm going to need a whole new wardrobe—"

"Mom—"

"What color is the room going to be? Are you doing the room? I have a friend at the casino whose sister paints murals. Little ducks. Little—what do you call them—"

"Mom, it's six weeks. It's the size of a poppy seed."

"Then we have plenty of time," said Colleen firmly. "I'm coming up Sunday. I'm bringing soup. I won't say a word about names. Okay, I'll say one word about names. Don't use a name that ends in -den. There are too many of them. The whole school will be filled with Jaydens and Hayden and Aidens, and nobody will be able to tell them apart."

"I'll make a note."

"Good. And Dessie?"

"Yes?"

"Does the father—does he know? Is he going to be, you know. Around?"

"He's a donor, Mom. He doesn't know who I am. I'll never know who he is. That's how it's supposed to work."

"Oh." A pause. "That's a sad thing, though. Isn't it? A man out there somewhere, with no idea."

Dess looked out at the gray Providence sky, at the wet street, at a gull picking over a crushed paper cup in the gutter.

"I think he'd probably be glad," she said. "I think he chose to be that way. It's a kind of gift."

"I suppose it is."

"He wrote something in his profile. About what he'd want his kid to know." She hesitated. "He said a wooden boat is just a tree that learned to float."

"Hm." Colleen considered this. "That's a nice thing. That sounds like a nice man."

"I think he was."

"Was?"

"Is," said Dess quickly. "Is. I don't know why I said it that way."

"You're tired. You're pregnant. You're allowed to be confused." Colleen's voice softened. "Get some rest. Eat something. I'll call you tonight, and we'll talk about everything. And Dessie?"

"Yes?"

"I love you. I'm sorry I said that thing. About you not thinking about me."

"You were right."

"I was a little right. I was also being dramatic." A beat. "It's a family tradition."

Dess was still laughing when the line went dead.

She put the phone in her lap and sat there, quite still. In the driver's seat, Joelle lowered her hand from the horn with exaggerated disappointment.

"I didn't even get to honk," she said.

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine. I'm saving it. I'll honk at the baby shower." She reached over and wiped a stray tear off Dess's cheek with her thumb, tender and efficient, like a woman clearing a windshield. "That was a good call."

"It was a good call."

"That was the best-case scenario. That was top-tier. I thought she'd cry for an hour."

"She did cry for an hour. It was just spread across the call."

"Efficient." Joelle took up her cruller again and looked at it with deep satisfaction. "Okay. Eat. We have twenty minutes. You're a mother now, and we're going to practice eating our feelings like professionals."

They ate in the warm car with the heater ticking, and for ten full minutes Dess forgot to be afraid.

…

That night she sat at her kitchen table with a mug of ginger tea she couldn't taste, the lamp turned low, the window open an inch to let in the smell of rain and the distant honk of a ship's horn from the harbor, and opened a notebook.

It was an ordinary notebook, with a blue squared cover and a spine she'd reinforced with packing tape years ago. She had kept a dozen like it since college. Inside, on every page, ruled down the middle with a steel ruler, were two columns. The left was headed Dess gave. The right, Dess received. She had started it at nineteen, after the third boyfriend of her mother's had borrowed three hundred dollars for a car repair that never materialized, and the habit had stuck. She did not keep it out of resentment. She kept it out of a fierce, cool, private love of fairness: the sense that if you could write a thing down, it could not be taken from you, and that if you owed a thing, you could pay it, and that if somebody owed you, you would know.

She turned to a fresh page. She dated it.

Under Dess gave, she wrote: Third cycle plan (cancelled). Two bad nights. One bathroom.

Under Dess received, she wrote, in her small neat hand:

One.

She stared at the word.

Then she crossed it out, and wrote instead, beneath the line, in letters that wobbled only slightly:

Everything.

She sat for a long time with the pen resting between her fingers, listening to the rain come in off the bay.

Her phone buzzed on the table. A news alert.

She almost ignored it. She was so tired, and the tea was so warm, and the lamp so gentle on the wood. But something made her reach over and turn the screen toward her, the way you turn to look at a car that's slowed down beside you at night.

NEWPORT, R.I. Christopher "Kit" Wexcombe, 24, heir to the Wexcombe Marine family, was killed Monday night when his vehicle left Ocean Drive near Brenton Point and struck a stone wall. Police said no other vehicles were involved. He is survived by his mother, Constance Wexcombe, and his brother, Theron Wexcombe, CEO of Wexcombe Marine Holdings.

Beneath the headline was a photograph.

A young man laughing on the deck of a small wooden boat. Sunburned nose. Hair in his eyes. A plane in one hand, a curl of pale wood shaving caught in the other, as if he'd just that moment looked up from his work to say something clever to whoever was holding the camera.

Dess sat very still.

She didn't know why her heart had begun to pound. It was a sad story, a young man, a stone wall, a mother. Terrible, the kind of thing you read on a rainy night and feel for a moment, and then close, and go to bed. She'd read a dozen like it this year. She had processed three hundred and twelve claims involving fatal accidents in her career, and she'd learned the necessary armor.

But there was something about the boy's face.

Something about the tilt of the head, and the way the light fell across his grin.

A wooden boat, she thought, quite clearly, is just a tree that learned to float.

She put the phone down, face down, very slowly, on the table.

Outside, the rain came harder. A ship's horn sounded across the harbor, long and low, and then another, answering. In the next room, the old radiator knocked twice and went quiet.

She laid one hand flat on her stomach. It felt exactly like it had that morning. It felt like nothing at all.

It's a coincidence, she told herself, in her firmest voice. It's a boy. There are thousands of boys. There are thousands of boats.

She picked up her tea. It had gone cold.

She drank it anyway.