A Secret in Her Father's House, A Pregnancy Neither Can Hide novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: Nine Days
The smell of bait hit Alana on Friday at noon, halfway down the dock, with Henrik's lunch in a paper bag.
She stopped.
She put her hand on a piling.
Her stomach turned over once, hard, and she bent and threw up into the river.
A deckhand on the next boat looked away politely.
She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and stood there, shaking, with the bag still in her other hand.
She had never been sick from a smell in her life.
She set the lunch down on the Maren's rail, left a note, and walked back up the pier without waiting to be seen.
She drove to Seaside.
It was a twenty-minute drive down the coast highway, past the rain-dark fields and the outlet stores, and it was a town where nobody would know her name.
She bought the test at a drugstore with a gift basket in the window.
She bought a bottle of water, a pack of gum and a magazine she did not look at, and she put the test in the middle of the pile.
The cashier did not look up.
She took it in the drugstore bathroom, in a stall that smelled of bleach and old cigarettes.
She sat on the closed lid with the stick on her knee and her phone timer running.
She thought about the budget for the hotel renovation, and about her calendar for next week.
She thought about nothing.
The timer went off.
She looked down.
There were two lines.
They were clear, and dark, and exactly the same color.
She sat there for a long time.
A woman came in and ran the tap, and left, and the door swung shut on its slow hinge.
Alana put the test in her purse and washed her hands and looked at her face in the mirror.
She did not look like a woman in any trouble.
She looked, if anything, a little bright.
She drove home with both hands on the wheel at ten and two.
She did not tell him.
She told herself she needed to be sure, and then that she needed to see a doctor, and then that there was a birthday dinner next week and her mother was coming.
She made the list in her head, point by point, and every point was a way of not saying it.
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