Father of Her Nephew

Chapter Three: Unexpected

They talked for longer than he meant to let it go.

She was funny. Not in the performing way, not playing to him, but in the dry, quiet way of a person who found the world genuinely absurd and had made peace with it. She said things plainly that other people spent energy decorating and he found it restful in a way he had not expected.

She asked him when he had last taken a day off. He told her eight months. She told him that was stupid with such unimpressed certainty that he had to agree.

"You're carrying it in your shoulders," she said, nodding at him. There was a matter-of-factness to it, clinical almost. "I can see it from here. You've been tight like that all night."

Fred glanced down at himself. "Occupational hazard."

"I can fix it," she said.

He looked up. She met his eyes steadily and there was nothing coy about the offer, no particular performance attached to it. "A massage," she clarified, as if she had read the thought. "I'm good at it. I used to do it for my sister when she got bad headaches." A small pause. "Just a massage."

He studied her for a moment.

The honest answer was that he was tired. Tired in his bones and his neck and somewhere behind his eyes that no amount of sleep was fixing lately. The honest answer was that the empty penthouse was waiting for him and the silence would be there and he was not ready for it yet.

"Alright," he said.

The hotel was quiet and the food was warm and she ate without pretending she wasn't hungry, which he found he liked. He had been around enough people who performed indifference to things they actually wanted that the straightforwardness of her just eating because the food was there and she was hungry felt almost radical.

He showered and she was still at the table when he came back, her shoes off and her legs tucked under her in the chair, looking out at the city through the window. She did not look up immediately. She was somewhere in her own thoughts and he did not interrupt them.

Then she stood and said, "Sit," and pointed at the edge of the bed and he obeyed before he thought about it, which was not something he did often.

Her hands were strong. Methodical. She worked without talking, finding the places that hurt before he could locate them himself and he sat there with his eyes closed and felt something unknot that had been pulled tight for so long he had stopped noticing it was there.

He started to say something and she pressed her thumb firmly into a knot just below his left shoulder blade and the sentence dissolved.

"You were saying?" she said, and he could hear the dry amusement in it.

"Nothing," he managed.

She kept going and the room was warm and the city hummed quietly outside and somewhere between one breath and the next he was asleep.

When Fred opened his eyes, the room was gray with early morning light.

He reached for his phone, habit before thought, and registered the time. He had slept for five hours straight. He could not remember the last time he had slept five hours straight.

There was warmth at his back.

He lay still for a moment, aware of her breathing, of the small shift of her shoulder against his. In the dark sometime he had turned toward her and she had not moved away.

He stayed another minute longer than he should have.

Then, quietly, he got up.

He stood at the bedside table with the cash in his hand and something sat wrong about it in a way he could not immediately name. He left it anyway because he did not know what else to do, because they had never exchanged names properly and he did not know how to turn this into anything other than what it had appeared to be.

He left the room without looking back.

In the elevator, he pressed the lobby button and stared at his reflection in the mirrored doors.

He did not know her last name. He did not know where she lived or what she looked like when she was not working or what her sister's name was or a hundred other things that had no business mattering to him.

He told himself he would not think about her again.

By the time the elevator reached the lobby, he had already thought about her three more times.

It started with a feeling.

Just a quiet, persistent wrongness that sat at the back of Rita's awareness for several days before she let herself look at it directly. A tiredness that sleep was not fixing. A faint nausea in the mornings that she blamed first on the cheap takeout from the place down the road, then on stress, then on nothing, because naming it felt like inviting it to be real.

She counted back on her fingers standing in the bathroom on a Wednesday morning, and then she counted again because the first count could not be right.

It was right.

She was late. Not a little late. Not the kind of late that happened sometimes when work was stressful and her body was being difficult. She was properly, significantly, ten days late and she was standing in her bathroom in her socks counting on her fingers like she was back in primary school.

She went to work. She served customers and smiled and processed transactions and said *have a good day* approximately forty times and the whole time, underneath all of it, the counting was still happening in some quiet back corner of her mind.

She stopped at the pharmacy on the way home.

She did not buy one test. She bought three, because she was going to be sensible about this, because one test could be wrong and she was a practical person who did not make decisions based on single data points.

Ruby was at the library. She would be gone for at least two more hours.

Rita locked the bathroom door anyway.

She sat on the edge of the bathtub and read the instructions on the box even though she already knew what they said. She read them twice. Then she set everything up with the methodical calm of a woman completing an administrative task and she waited.

The waiting was the worst part.

Two minutes had never been so long in her entire life. She set her phone face down on the sink so she could not watch the timer and she looked at the water stain on the ceiling that she and Ruby had been meaning to tell the landlord about for four months and she breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

She picked up the test.

Two lines.

She put it down. She picked up the second one. Waited. Looked.

Two lines.

She did not pick up the third one. She already knew what it was going to say.