Chapter 8: Two Lines

Six weeks after the hearing, I threw up in the fourth-floor bathroom for the third morning in a row.

I knelt on the cold tile with my braid in one fist and my forehead against the stall.

My hands smelled like the hand soap, which was lavender, which I suddenly hated.

I counted backward on my fingers.

I counted again.

Then I stood, rinsed my mouth, and looked at myself in the mirror.

I looked like a woman who had stopped eating for the wrong reasons.

"No," I told the mirror.

"Absolutely not."

The mirror did not agree.

In those six weeks, Nolan and I had not been alone in a room.

It was not that we hadn't wanted to.

The night in his penthouse was in my head every hour of every day.

But Tate watched everything, and the whole floor still whispered when I passed.

So I had kept my head down and done my work.

Nolan had given me space I did not ask for, and every time I looked up from my desk he was somewhere nearby, not looking.

Once he left a sleeve of crackers on my keyboard.

I ate every one.

After work that day I took the bus to a clinic on the east side.

It had a sliding glass window and a sign that said WALK-INS WELCOME.

The test I had bought at a drugstore was in my bag.

It had two pink lines.

I had taken three, in case the first two were wrong.

The nurse took my name and my blood and sent me down a hall to a dim room with a bed and a screen.

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