Father of Her Nephew

Chapter Four: Devastation

The flashback came without permission and without warning, arriving with the full sensory weight of a memory that had been waiting for the right moment to make itself known.

The hotel room. The dark. The way he had said her name.

And before that — earlier that day, the ordinary Tuesday of it, she had been running late for her shift and she had grabbed her bag and rushed out and the small pill organizer on the bathroom counter had sat right where she left it, untouched, her Wednesday compartment still full because she had not taken Tuesday yet.

She had known. In the back of her mind she had filed it as something to sort out later and then later had become the hotel room and then the hotel room had become this bathroom and this bathroom had become two pink lines on three plastic sticks.

Rita set the test down on the edge of the sink very carefully.

She sat back down on the edge of the bathtub.

She did not cry right away. First there was just the sitting, the very still sitting, while her brain tried to arrange what it knew into an order that made sense. She was twenty-four years old. She worked a cash register at a boutique that smelled like expensive candles during the day and she took her clothes off for strangers at night and her combined income just about covered rent and Ruby's books and groceries if they were careful.

She did not know his name.

She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and stared at the tile floor and the fact of it just sat there in the room with her, solid and immovable, not caring in the slightest that she was not ready for it.

He could be anyone. He could be nobody. She had followed him to a hotel like an i***t and she did not even know his last name and he had left money on the table and walked out and she had gone home and filed the whole thing away under *do not think about this* and now —

Her face crumpled.

She did not make any noise at first. She just sat there with her face doing what it was doing and her eyes burning and her chest pulling tight. She had promised herself a long time ago, after their parents died and she watched Ruby fall apart and had to hold herself together to hold Ruby together, that she would do her breaking down privately and efficiently and then she would move on.

So she sat in the locked bathroom with the three tests on the sink and she broke down as privately and efficiently as she could manage.

It was not that efficient.

She was not sure how long she sat there. Long enough for the light through the small bathroom window to shift. Long enough for her back to start aching from the edge of the bathtub.

When it was done it was done. She stood up. She washed her face with cold water and pressed a wet flannel against her eyes and looked at herself in the mirror.

She looked terrible. She always looked terrible after she cried, blotchy and swollen and thoroughly unconvincing as a person who had things under control.

She wrapped the tests in tissue paper and buried them in the bottom of the waste bin.

Then she unlocked the bathroom door and went to the kitchen and put the kettle on because Ruby would be home in an hour and Ruby could not know yet. Rita had not figured out what she knew yet herself and she could not have that conversation before she had figured it out.

She stood at the counter and stared at the kettle and thought about a man with dark eyes who had slept for five solid hours and said *you're good* into a hotel pillow with genuine surprise.

She thought about the money on the table.

She thought about how she had not even learned his name.

She was pouring the tea when she heard Ruby's key in the door, and she arranged her face into something resembling normal and turned around with a mug in each hand.

"You're home early," she said.

Ruby dropped her bag by the door and kicked off her shoes with the particular enthusiasm of someone who had been in uncomfortable footwear for too long. "Library got boring," she said. "Also there's a group of second years who think whispering means talking at half volume." She dropped onto the couch and pulled a throw pillow into her lap. "Are you okay? You look a bit —"

"Tired," Rita said quickly. "Just tired."

Ruby looked at her for a moment with those honey-colored eyes that saw too much and always had, ever since she was small, and Rita looked back at her steadily and handed her a mug.

"Long shift," Rita added.

"Okay," Ruby said, accepting this, and turned on the television.

Rita sat beside her and pulled the other throw pillow into her own lap and stared at the screen and did not see a single thing that was on it.

She had one decision to make. One clear fork in the road sitting right in front of her, and she had to choose a direction before she could figure out anything else.

But there was something else too. Something smaller, sitting quietly underneath all the fear and the practicality and the careful accounting of what this would cost her.

Something that felt, very inconveniently, a little like wonder.

She waited two days.

That was how long it took her to find the words, or at least a version of them that she could say out loud without her voice doing something embarrassing. Two days of moving around the apartment with the secret sitting heavy in her chest, of watching Ruby eat breakfast and do homework and laugh at things on her phone, of thinking *I have to tell her* every single hour and then finding a reason to wait a little longer.

On the third morning she woke up before Ruby and made a proper breakfast. Eggs, toast, the good orange juice they usually saved for weekends. She set the table and she sat down and she waited.

Ruby appeared in the kitchen doorway in her oversized sleep shirt, hair everywhere, squinting at the table with the suspicion of someone who had grown up learning that good food sometimes preceded bad news.

"What happened," she said. It was not a question.

Rita had planned to ease into it. She had rehearsed something gentle and gradual that started with *so you know how things can be complicated sometimes* and worked its way toward the point over several careful sentences.

Instead she said, "I'm pregnant."

The silence was immediate and total.

Ruby stood in the doorway and stared at her and Rita stared back and the eggs went cold between them.

"Say something," Rita said finally.

"I'm —" Ruby stopped. Started again. "How."

"Ruby."

"I know how, I mean —" Ruby pressed her fingers to her forehead and crossed the kitchen and sat down heavily in her chair. She looked at Rita with those wide honey-colored eyes and Rita could see her working through it in real time, the shock reorganizing itself into something more functional. "The man from the club."

"Yes."

"The one you don't know the name of."

Rita said nothing because there was nothing useful to say to that.

"Okay," Ruby said. Then again, quieter, to herself. "Okay." She reached across the table and put her hand over Rita's and was quiet for a moment. "How far along?"

"Four weeks, I think. Maybe five."

Ruby nodded slowly. She was doing the thing she always did when she was scared, keeping her voice very level and her face very calm, and Rita loved her so much in that moment it was almost painful.

"What are you thinking?" Ruby asked carefully.

"I don't know yet," Rita said, which was honest. "I'm still — I haven't landed anywhere yet."

Ruby squeezed her hand once and did not push, and they sat there together with the cold eggs and the good orange juice and the particular weight of a morning that had changed the shape of things.