The Bump That Wasn't There

The fluorescent lights of the twenty-third floor hummed the way they always did around four in the afternoon, that low electric drone that sank into your molars if you sat still long enough. I was three slides away from finishing the quarterly deck for the Whitmore account, and my cursor had been blinking in the same spot for six minutes because I couldn't decide whether to say "synergy" or just admit the two departments hated each other. Shelby rounded the corner of my cubicle wall slowly, one hand braced on the fabric partition, the other splayed across the front of her dress. She'd been doing that since week nine, cradling that small curve like it was a Fabergé egg. "Elise," she said. "You got a second?" I saved the deck out of habit. "Sure." She lowered herself into the guest chair, and it took her a while, the way it always did now, one hand on the armrest, then the other, then a little exhale at the end. I'd watched her do it a hundred times. I'd started holding doors for her without thinking about it. That's the thing about proximity. You absorb habits before you notice you've absorbed them. "I need to ask you something," she said. Her eyes were doing that thing where they looked everywhere except my face, darting to the printer, to the window, to the sad little succulent I'd kept alive for two years out of spite. "Okay." "That house you have, the one off Mercer, the one with the driveway." She finally looked at me. "How far is it from here? Like ten minutes?" "Eight, if I hit the lights right." She nodded like she already knew. Of course she knew. I'd mentioned it at lunch three weeks ago, offhand, the way you mention things to coworkers you're friendly with but not close to. I said something about how I couldn't stay late because I had to run home and let the plumber in. She'd asked which house. I'd told her. "I've been meaning to talk to you about something," she said. "I'm not sure how to say it without sounding like a complete disaster." "You can just say it." She put her hand on the edge of my desk, and I noticed her nails, unpainted, filed short, the way you do when you're afraid of scratching a newborn. It was a small thing. But I noticed it. "The commute is killing me," she said. "I live out past Fenton, and with the transfer and the parking and everything, it's two hours each way on a good day. And with the baby coming, and the doctor's appointments, and I just... I can't do it anymore, Elise. I can't do two hours in a car at eight months." I didn't say anything yet. "I know we're not, like, best friends," she said, and she laughed a little, self-deprecating, the way you do when you're about to ask for something big. "But you're the only person I know with a place near the office. And it would only be for a few months. I'd be out before the baby even started sleeping through the night. I swear. You wouldn't even know I was there." She was good. I want to be fair to her, even now, even after everything. She was good. She timed her breaths. She let her voice c***k on exactly one word, the way a person does when they've practiced. Or maybe she didn't practice. Maybe it was just true, and I'm only calling it practice because of what came later. I can't always tell the difference anymore. "I'd pay rent," she said. "Obviously. Whatever you'd charge. I'm not trying to freeload." "No, I know," I said. "I wasn't thinking that." And I wasn't. That's the part that still bothers me, if I'm honest, more than the rest of it. In that moment, I was just thinking about her. About the drive. About the fact that she'd taken the bus the week her car was in the shop and showed up with wet hair and I'd felt bad for her. That was the whole of my reasoning. My fiancé, Davis, had been telling me for months that I say yes too fast, that I let people in too easy, that my first instinct is always to hand someone the key and hope they don't notice the silverware. And he was right, mostly. But being right and being useful are different things. "Let me talk to Davis," I said. "But I don't think it's a problem." Shelby's whole face opened up. It was a real expression, I'm almost sure of it. The kind of relief that comes out of your chest before your brain can catch up and tell it to act right. "Really?" "Really. I'll text you tonight." She stood up, and it took her two tries to get out of the chair, and when she did, she hugged me. Not a side hug, not a work hug with the little pat on the back. A real one, her belly pressing into my waist, her chin on my shoulder. She smelled like baby powder, which I thought at the time was sweet and now think was a choice. "Thank you," she said into my ear. "You have no idea what this means." She pulled back and her sleeve caught on my chair and rode up her forearm, and I saw it. A tan line, pale against her skin, about an inch wide, right where a hospital band would sit. Fresh. Whatever had been there had come off recently, within a week, maybe less. A hospital bracelet. I saw it for about a second and a half, and then she pulled her sleeve down and walked away, and I went back to my deck and wrote "synergy" after all, because it was four in the afternoon and I had a deadline and I didn't have time to think about my coworker's arm. But I did think about it. On the drive home, at the red light on Mercer, I thought about it. And I almost texted her to ask if everything was okay, if she'd been to the doctor, if there was something she wasn't telling me. I had the message typed out and my thumb hovering over send. Then my phone buzzed in my hand, and a message popped up from a number I didn't recognize, no area code I knew, nothing but digits. Unknown: She lost that baby on Tuesday. I sat there through the green light. The car behind me honked. I pulled into the driveway and sat in the dark with the engine off and read the message six more times, and every time I read it, it made a little less sense and a little more sense at the same time. I didn't text Shelby that night. I told Davis about the room, and he said it was fine, that it was generous of me, that Shelby was lucky to have me. He was in the kitchen, making pasta, and he said it over his shoulder while he was stirring, and he didn't turn around once. I told him I'd think about it. I didn't sleep much. I kept thinking about the bracelet tan line and the smell of baby powder and the way Shelby had said "you have no idea what this means" into my ear, and I kept thinking about how, in all the months I'd known her, she had never once mentioned the baby's father's name.