My Midnight Mistake

CHAPTER FOUR: Three weeks

The thing about deciding not to think about something is that it requires thinking about it constantly.

Every time I sat down at my desk I didn't think about the gap in my memory. Every time I walked past the café where Caden ordered black coffee without looking at the menu I didn't think about the way he'd looked at me by the fire before everything went soft at the edges. Every time Maya started a sentence and stopped herself I didn't think about the text she'd sent at 3AM and how quickly she'd replied when I said don't ask yet.

Three weeks of not thinking about it.

I got very good at it. Almost.

The campus moved through October the way it always did, midterms arriving like weather everyone had been warned about and nobody had sufficiently prepared for. I prepared sufficiently. I always prepared sufficiently. I sat in Aldine's third row and wrote fourteen more pages of notes and submitted a research methods paper four days before the deadline and ate the same peanut butter sandwich for lunch three days in a row because I'd forgotten to think about food and peanut butter required no decisions.

Maya watched me from across the room sometimes with an expression I didn't have the bandwidth to interpret.

We talked about everything except Blackwood. Her marketing assignments. The new coffee brand in the dining hall that tasted like someone had described coffee to a person who had never had coffee. A documentary she'd watched twice and wanted me to watch so she'd have someone to process it with.

Normal things. Safe things.

Neither of us went near the edge.

Caden texted on day three.

I was at my desk. 7AM. Coffee going cold beside my notes because I'd poured it and then forgotten about it, which was something I never did.

The notification slid across the top of my screen.

Hey. Can we talk?

I looked at it for long enough that the screen dimmed. Then I turned my phone face-down, opened my biochemistry notes to the page I'd bookmarked, and read the same paragraph about the electron transport chain until the words lost their meaning entirely and became just shapes on a page.

He didn't text again.

I didn't know what that meant. I told myself it didn't matter. I cycled through both of those thoughts approximately forty times over the following week and arrived at no useful conclusions.

On day fourteen I went to the campus health center.

Told the nurse practitioner I'd been having trouble sleeping. She asked about stress. I said yes, some. She gave me a pamphlet about sleep hygiene with a section on limiting screen time before bed and a recommendation for chamomile tea, and I walked out into the cold with a pamphlet and a question I'd been refusing to complete.

I finished it on the walk back.

Stopped in the middle of the path, students moving around me, somebody's bike bell ringing, the ordinary Tuesday machinery of campus life continuing without pause, and let myself think the whole thought for the first time since I'd walked out of Blackwood. Just one drink and a gap I couldn't account for. Three weeks. Late.

I stood there for a moment. Then I straightened my bag strap and kept walking and held my face the way I'd learned to hold it a long time ago, back in Grover's Creek, back when holding your face was the only thing standing between you and giving someone the satisfaction of knowing they'd gotten to you.

I didn't go back to the campus health center.

Day twenty-one was a Tuesday.

Of course it was.

I drove to Grover's Creek before the campus woke up. Not to my mother's house, I wasn't ready for her face anywhere near this, for her hands going still the way they did when she was frightened, for the kitchen table where she'd pressed the scholarship letter flat like something precious. Not yet.

I went to the gas station on Mercer Street. The one where the woman behind the counter had worked the morning shift for eleven years and had never once looked at a customer like she recognized them. I'd noticed that months ago and filed it away without knowing why.

Now I knew why.

I bought the test, a bottle of water, and a granola bar I put in my bag and forgot about. The counter woman handed me my change without looking up. I took the bathroom key from the hook by the register, attached to a wooden block the size of a small brick, because this was Grover's Creek and things were practical here even when they were ugly, and let myself into the single bathroom around the side of the building.

Fluorescent light. A mirror with a c***k running from the upper left corner. The smell of industrial cleaner that never quite covered the smell underneath.

I read the instructions twice even though I already knew them.

Set the test on the edge of the sink.

Set my phone timer for two minutes.

Stood with my back against the wall and looked at the ceiling and thought about the notebook under my mattress. The plan. Graduate with honors. Research placement. Something real, something permanent, something built from nothing by a girl from Grover's Creek who had decided a very long time ago that the only way out was through and had been moving through ever since. The timer went off.

I looked at the ceiling for three more seconds. A habit, like if I waited long enough the result might change, or I might become someone who could receive it differently.

Then I looked at the test.

Two lines.

I picked it up. Checked it again in case the light was doing something, in case I'd misread, in case there was any version of this moment that wasn't what it clearly was.

There wasn't.

I set it back down on the edge of the sink and sat beside it and looked at us both in the cracked mirror. The girl in the reflection looked the way I felt, not destroyed, not falling apart, just very still. Like something had just shifted the weight distribution of everything and her body was making the quiet adjustments required to stay upright.

I sat with it for a moment. Just the two of us, me and the two lines, in that bathroom with the fluorescent light and the cracked mirror.

Then I cried.

Not long. Four minutes, maybe five. I didn't time it, that detail from an earlier version of this morning I'd imagined was wrong. You don't time grief, even the preliminary kind, even when you're the sort of person who times everything else. You just let it move through you and then you wash your face with cold water and look at yourself in the mirror until the person looking back resembles the one you recognize.

She was still there.

Tired. Scared in a way that went bone-deep. But there.

I put the test in my bag. Unlocked the door. Stepped out into the Grover's Creek morning, a woman walking a dog past the pumps, a truck pulling in from the highway, somebody's radio playing through a cracked window, ordinary and indifferent and completely unaware.

I got in my car.

Pressed my palms flat on my thighs and breathed.

That was when my phone rang.

Unknown number. I answered before I'd decided to, the way you do when your body is still running on autopilot while your brain is somewhere else entirely.

"Aurora Lane." A man's voice. Measured. The kind of voice that expected things to move when it spoke.

"Yes."

"My name is Harrison Wolf." A pause with weight in it, perfectly placed. "I think we should meet."

The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with October.

I stared through the windshield at a gas station in Grover's Creek and understood, with a clarity that arrived all at once rather than gradually, that this phone call was not a coincidence.

He'd called me this morning. This specific morning. Before I'd spoken to a single person.

Which meant he already knew.

Which meant someone had told him.

And the only people who knew anything about that night were Caden, Maya, and,

"Route 9 Diner," Harrison Wolf said. "Noon today."

The line went dead.

I sat in the car for a long moment. Then I opened Caden's unanswered text from three weeks ago and typed four words beneath it.

We need to talk.

The reply came in thirty-eight seconds.

I know. I've been waiting.