Chapter 12: Two Lines

By the second week of November I was three days late, and I told myself it was stress.

It had been a stressful month.

My sister's blood counts were rising and falling.

My husband's company was bracing for a board meeting.

There were two vials left in a freezer in Chicago.

And there was a man in my bed every night who touched me.

I told myself a late period was only fair.

On Monday morning I bought a test at a drugstore on Oakland Avenue.

I couldn't stand to be seen buying one near the house.

I read the instructions twice.

I sat on the edge of the tub in the guest bathroom.

Then I waited the longest three minutes of my life.

Two pink lines came up before the timer finished.

I held it under the light.

They were dark, sure and unmistakable.

I held it under the light again.

I thought: that is not possible.

We'd had one cancelled procedure, a freezer failure and two vials in a locked tank.

Nothing had gone into me but my husband's body.

I laughed once, out loud, a strange hiccup of a laugh.

I was still sitting there when someone knocked on the door.

"Hanna?" Matthias's voice, low through the wood. "You've been in there twenty minutes. Are you all right?"

I opened the door.

He stood in the hall in his suit trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

One look at my face made him go still.

"What is it?"

I held up the stick.

He took it from me with two fingers.

He looked at it for a very long time.

"That's..." he said.

"Two lines."

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