He Had a Wife I Never Knew, So I Married Her Brother novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Two Lines

A positive test, and a pharmacist who says every pill in her box was filler. Gavin turns up at her desk with flowers.

Marcy bought four pregnancy tests at the drugstore on Saturday morning, because she said one could lie.

I sat on the edge of her tub with my knees together and the first one in my hand.

"Don't watch it," Marcy called through the door. "A watched stick never turns."

"That's a pot."

"It works for both."

I watched it anyway.

Two pink lines came up before I had finished breathing out.

I took the second test, and the third, and the fourth.

All of them showed two lines.

I opened the door and held all four up.

Marcy looked at them for a long time.

Then she said, "Okay. I'm going to say a bad word, and then I'm going to hug you."

She said it, and she hugged me.

I stood in her arms and thought about the pill box in my bag.

"I took one every day," I said. "He stood there every Sunday and watched me take it."

"Who stood there?"

"Gavin."

Marcy let go and held me by both shoulders.

"Lin. Does Gavin do anything without watching?"

I thought about the binder on the shelf, and the way he had cooked every dinner for three years.

I thought about how he always had the key to my door, because he had gotten it copied.

"Bring the box Monday," Marcy said. "A pharmacist downstairs at St. Brendan's owes me for the thing with her insurance. She'll look at them."

I did not sleep that night on Marcy's couch.

At eight on Monday morning I was at St. Brendan's, standing in the basement pharmacy with the pill box open on the counter.

The pharmacist was a tired woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up in her hair.

She tipped the Saturday pill into her palm and turned it over under a lamp.

"What am I looking at?" she said.

"My birth control."

"Who prescribed it?"

"I get it from a mail-order place. My boyfriend handles the refills."

She took a scalpel from a drawer and cut the pill in half.

She sniffed it, and then she touched her tongue to the cut edge, which I had not known pharmacists did.

"This isn't birth control," she said.

I held the counter.

"There's no imprint. It's lactose and cornstarch, with a coat of pink. It's a sugar pill."

"All of them?"

She checked all seven, one at a time, and cut each in half.

"All of them. Hon, did you have a prescription bottle?"

"He kept the bottle."

She put her glasses down onto her nose and looked at me.

"I need you to hear this," she said. "Whoever gave you these knew exactly what they were."

"Can you write that down?"

She was already pulling a form from the drawer.

She wrote what she had found, signed it, and dated it, and she made a copy for me.

"Don't give him your original," she said. "Keep it where he can't reach."

I folded the paper into my bra, under my cardigan, because it was the only place on me he had never had a key to.

Upstairs, my desk was at the end of the billing office, behind a frosted glass wall and a ficus Marcy said was dying out of spite.

I sat down.

I put my badge on.

I opened a file for a man with a broken ankle and a deductible of two thousand dollars.

I had typed his first name when the office went quiet.

Not all at once.

It spread from the front, desk by desk.

I looked up.

Gavin was walking down the aisle between the cubicles in his good coat with a bouquet of white roses.

He had shaved.

He smiled at the women at their desks, and they smiled back, because he had the kind of face people trusted.

"Excuse me, ladies," he said. "I'm sorry to barge in. My wife and I had a fight, and I'm trying to fix it."

My wife.

Someone at the next desk said, "Aww."

I stood up so fast my chair rolled into the wall.

"I'm not your wife."

"Lin."

"Your wife is Philippa Anne Roswell."

I said it loud.

The whole billing office heard it.

Gavin didn't blink.

"That is a very old paperwork problem," he said, gently, to the room. "I'm getting it fixed. She's upset, she's had a shock, and I understand."

He set the flowers on my keyboard.

Then he took a small white paper bag out of his coat and set it down on the roses.

"I got you something."

I did not touch it.

"Open it, baby."

Marcy had come up behind me.

She opened the bag with two fingers.

Inside was a bottle of prenatal vitamins with the price tag still on.

Marcy looked at the bottle.

She looked at me.

I had told no one about the test but Marcy.

I had not told Gavin, and I had not told my aunt.

"How," I said, "did you know to buy those?"

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