Chapter 11: The Shower

Nobody on the bench had heard me but Nathan.

Blair was checking her phone.

Mitchell was watching the officer, waiting for her to say something about my mother.

"Are you sure?" Nathan said very quietly.

"I'm sure. April seventeenth. It was raining. Mitchell held my hand in the waiting room."

I had been twenty-one.

Nine weeks. Nobody knew but the two of us. We hadn't even told my mother.

Two days after that scan, it was over.

Mitchell had asked if he could keep the picture.

He'd said he wanted something to prove she'd been real.

The officer let my mother go at eight that night.

The threats charge was gone. She'd called the clinic herself and talked to the receptionist and two of the patients.

The assault stayed. There was a court date in December.

My mother walked out through the station doors in her smock and saw me sitting in Nathan's truck.

She got in the back and didn't say anything for three blocks.

Then she reached forward and put her hand on my shoulder and left it there the whole way home.

I did bed rest.

I lay on her bed over the laundromat and felt the dryers thumping through the mattress, and I didn't get up except to pee.

Nathan came every evening with groceries and his laptop. He ran Tidewise tests on my mother's kitchen table so I could watch from the bed.

On the eighth day, my mother came in holding her phone.

Her face was gray.

"You need to see this," she said. "And then you need to not do anything about it."

It was Blair's page.

A photo of a white cake with a pink fondant crib on top.

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