Chapter 15: Three Percent

The first test was in the staff bathroom at school.

I sat on the lid of the toilet and did not look at it for a full minute.

When I did look, there was a second line.

It was faint, and it was pink, and it was there.

I took three more tests that afternoon in the Walgreens bathroom across the street, and every one of them agreed.

Then I called the obstetrician Imogen had recommended, a woman who had never once said the word barren.

She drew my blood that same evening, and she called me at nine.

"Mrs. Hartwell, it's strong," she said. "It's very strong. Congratulations."

I sat on the edge of the bathtub in the dark and put my hand over my mouth.

Three percent.

I had spent six years learning to live inside that number.

I had never once learned what to do on the other side of it.

Elias was in the kitchen when I came out, still in his work shirt, with the gray cat on the island watching him chop an onion.

He looked up, and he saw my face, and the knife stopped.

"Don't say anything yet," I said.

I put the clinic's printout on the counter beside the cutting board.

He wiped his hands on a towel, very slowly, and picked it up.

He read it.

He read it a second time.

The paper trembled, and I realized it was his hand.

"I need to ask you something," he said.

"Ask."

"Are you happy?"

I had expected a hundred questions.

I hadn't expected that one, and it undid me.

"Yes," I said. "I'm so happy I'm terrified."

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