BOUGHT BY SILENCE, BOUND BY BLOOD

**Chapter 11: Counting**

They drove back to Ashcroft in something that felt entirely different from the silence of the trip out — easier, warmer, though neither of them said much out loud about what had happened in the diner. Some things, Annabelle had learned, were better held quietly for a while before they were tested against the noise of campus.

"We should probably figure out what this is," Max said, eyes on the road, "before we figure out who else needs to know about it."

"Agreed." She watched the highway markers slide past, the same ones from the night before, though the whole world looked different in daylight. "Priya's going to be a problem."

"Priya's always a problem. That's not new information."

"This kind of problem is different." Annabelle chose her words carefully. "She watches you like she's keeping score of something. I don't think either of us wants to find out what she does with a scorecard like that."

Max's jaw tightened, some old, tired acknowledgment in it. "I know. I've known for a while, honestly. I just didn't want to deal with it." He glanced at her. "Can we agree to keep this quiet for now? Not because I'm ashamed of it. Because I want to actually understand what it is before it becomes public property for the entire department to have opinions about."

"That's fair," Annabelle said, relieved he'd said it first — she hadn't wanted to be the one asking for secrecy and have it read as shame on her end, when the truth was simpler: she needed room to breathe before Ashcroft decided what their story meant.

Keeping it quiet proved easier in theory than in practice.

Room 412's temporary arrangement had four days left before the east wing reopened, and those four days stretched into something neither of them had expected to want to hold onto — small domestic routines that had nothing to do with rivalry and everything to do with two people learning the specific shape of each other. He learned to leave her half a granola bar without asking. She learned to leave the desk lamp on low when she went to sleep before him, because he worked better with a little light and never asked for it.

She still hadn't told him about the nausea, which had not, despite her best efforts at denial, resolved itself into anything explainable by stress alone.

It caught up with her fully on a Tuesday morning, ambushing her in the small bathroom down the hall before her first alarm had even finished ringing, and she knelt on the tile afterward with her back against the cool wall, breathing hard, running the numbers she'd been avoiding for two weeks with the same cold clarity she brought to every equation Professor Ilori had ever put in front of her.

Delta Row had been five weeks ago.

She was, she realized with the particular vertigo of watching an entire mental filing system collapse at once, three weeks late.

Stress, said the old, tired voice in her head, the one that had gotten her through years of hardship by simply refusing to entertain the worst option until it was unavoidable. It's stress. Stress does this. It's happened before.

But stress, she knew — some clinical, distant part of her mind supplying the fact before she could stop it — didn't usually come paired with nausea this specific, this consistent, this married to smell and time of day in a pattern she recognized now that she was finally willing to look at it directly.

She sat on the bathroom floor for a long time before she trusted herself to stand.

She didn't have the money for a test. She didn't have the money for anything, that was the whole cruel joke of her entire existence, every crisis eventually reducible to the same three-dollar problem multiplied by whatever the stakes happened to be that week. A pregnancy test cost somewhere between ten and twenty dollars depending on the brand, and she had eleven dollars in her checking account until Friday's paycheck, already earmarked twice over for things that couldn't wait.

She told herself she'd figure it out. She told herself there was still a chance it was nothing, some cruel coincidence of stress and bad luck conspiring to frighten her over what would turn out to be a late cycle and nothing more.

She did not tell Max. Not that day, not the day after. She wasn't ready to turn a maybe into a certainty out loud, not yet, not when the maybe was the only version of this where her life still made sense.

She went to class instead, and worked her shift, and let Max kiss her goodnight in the dark of Room 412 with a tenderness that made the secret in her chest feel heavier by the hour, and told herself, again and again, that she had time.

She did not, as it turned out, have quite as much time as she thought. While the next day , Josie saw her coming to the cafeteria and was worried. she asked her ? Annabelle you look pale ? what happened? what are the other symptoms you are getting? Annabelle replied, I've been tired , vomiting and I don't know, wait ! I haven't seen my period for almost months now. Josie asked her ; Did you have s*x with someone at the party then?

she couldn't bring herself to answer it . she just told her not to bother that it's stress but something inside her mind was telling her that she's pregnant.