Bound by Love novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Two Lines

The pharmacy was four blocks from the house, and I walked there with a bodyguard ten steps behind me.

Adriano's driver had followed me out of the garden gate without a word.

I let him.

I bought crackers, ginger tea and a test, and I paid cash.

In the pharmacy bathroom, I sat on the lid of the toilet with the little plastic stick in my hand and looked at the door.

I thought of my husband's voice in the dark.

I can't give you children.

I thought, there's a way this is wrong.

I thought, the box says ninety-nine percent.

Two pink lines showed up before I finished the thought.

I stared at them until the plastic blurred.

There was a very quiet sound in my head.

I put my hand on my stomach, flat, under my coat.

Four weeks of nights, every one of them without a thing between us, because he had told me it didn't matter.

He had told me, and he had believed it.

I washed my face in the sink and looked at myself in the mirror.

A woman looked back who had just broken a treaty and found out she was pregnant in the same day.

"Okay," I said to her. "Okay."

I threw the test in the trash under a pile of paper towels.

I was not going to tell him in a pharmacy.

I was going to tell him tonight, with the door locked, and watch his face.

Back at the house, the wives of three captains were sitting in the front room with tea.

Adriano's housekeeper had set it out, and I walked in on the middle of a sentence.

"...seven weeks and no news," one was saying.

She was a round, pleasant woman in a blue wool dress.

She turned to me with a bright smile.

"Alessia, dear, we were just saying how lovely it would be to hear a baby in this house."

Every woman in the room looked at me.

My hand was still half-lifted to take off my coat, and I put it down.

"Well," I said. "It's early."

"It's the nicest thing in the world," said another wife. "Isn't it, Osvaldo?"

Osvaldo stood in the doorway with a cup of coffee.

I hadn't seen him come in.

"There's a time for everything," he said, still smiling.

"Now, ladies, would anyone like to see the garden? My late sister-in-law planted the roses."

He took them out through the French doors, talking about roses, and I stood in the empty room and watched him go.

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