For a second I think she’s going to touch my arm. She doesn’t. For a second I think I’m going to tuck that one impossible strand of hair behind her ear. I don’t.
Finally, she nods and turns away.
She gets in her car. I stand and watch her taillights slide away, red fading around the corner.
I go back up the steps and sit where I was when she pulled in. I am still scared. I am still steady. I am still exactly where I said I’d be.
Tomorrow we tell her mother. Then, we take the next step. And the one after that.
Chapter Twenty Five
Paige
I can’t make my feet be still.
I keep telling myself to sit, to breathe, to stop wearing a path between the sink and the back door, but my body doesn’t listen to what my brain wants.
I pace the length of the kitchen, the soles of my sneakers whispering against the old wood, then turn and cross it again, palms skimming the cool edge of the butcher-block, pausing at the window to stare out at the river.
It’s doing what it always does this time of afternoon—sliding blue and silver past our yard, sunlight forking through the maples to stitch little diamonds across the surface. It looks calm.
I am not calm.
My stomach rolls, again, the same low, sloshy nausea that’s been here since I woke up this morning. I press the back of my wrist to my mouth and breathe through my nose until it eases. The ginger chews Mom keeps in the ceramic jar by the coffee maker help, a little. I pinch the lid open, fish one out, and bite down. It’s spicy-sweet, a burn that’s comforting.
My phone face down on the counter sits there silently, but every few seconds, my eyes jump to it like I can will the time faster.
Ben: On my way. Ten, fifteen minutes.
That was eight minutes ago. Or eighty. Time has seemed ‘off’ all day, stretched and thin like taffy.
I walk to the doorway and peer down the hall toward the front of the house. “Mom?” I call, and my voice comes out too bright.
“In here,” Mom answers from the front room.
I picture her in the wingback by the window that faces the road, needle moving in neat little bites through whatever quilt she’s finishing now, a glass of water on the side table, the coaster under it a thing she crocheted in the exact pattern of a snowflake.
I go back to looking out at the river.
I needed to be sure before I asked him to come.
I’d been sure anyway, but I still stood at the window and watched the driveway for a long time after I texted him, counting the cars that eased past our turnoff, telling myself that if Dad or Jason swung into the gravel unexpectedly I’d send Ben a frantic ‘Never mind, abort, go home.’
They didn’t. Mom’s car and mine are the only ones here. Dad took the truck out to help a neighbor haul brush; Jason isn’t expected at dinner tonight, but I checked to make sure he’ll be at work regardless.
I swallow hard, reach for my bag, and slide the folder from the clinic out just enough to see the fat little letters stamped on the corner. Paige Richards. The paper is already soft at the edges because I keep taking the strip of grainy pictures out, looking, putting it back. I press the folder flat on the counter, then tuck it back into the bag like a secret.
My phone buzzes, making me jump.
Ben: Here.
I glance toward the hall one more time. “Mom?” I call again, trying to summon casual and hoping it doesn’t come out strangled. “Can you come out to the patio?”
There’s a pause. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” I say too quickly and then, more honestly, “I just need to talk to you for a second.”
She appears in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on the legs of her jeans like she always does when she’s been working with fabric. Her hair is twisted up with a pencil, and she’s wearing one of Dad’s old button-downs over a T-shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow.
