Page 107 of Roadrunner

“The window overlaps,” Martina said.

“There’s something else,” I said. “Riley and I were always careful. Every time. After everything my parents used to warn me about ruining my life, I made sure of it myself. I wasn’t about to be careless with something that mattered that much.” I looked at my hands. “So even if the timing lines up for May, the odds of it actually being him are supposed to be next to nothing.”

“Supposed to be,” Martina said.

“Supposed to be,” I agreed. “Nothing’s ever completely certain. I know that. But it’s not nothing either, believing two careful people took precautions and still ending up here, questioning it eleven years later.”

I stared at the table. “If the conception was May, he’s Riley’s. If it was June—” I stopped. “But here’s the thing I keep coming back to.”

Martina looked at me.

“Joshua never questioned it,” I said. “When I told him I was pregnant, he accepted it. Immediately. Without hesitation.” I held her gaze. “He accepted that it was his child.”

She said nothing.

“Which means he believed it was probable and possible,” I said. I looked at my hands. “Which means the child is probably Joshua’s.”

The kitchen was quiet.

Martina looked at her coffee.

“Say something,” I said.

“I’m thinking,” she said.

“Think faster.”

“Joshua accepted many things,” she said carefully. “He was not a man who spent much time on the parts of a story that did not serve him.”

I stared at her.

She picked up her coffee. “That’s my thought,” she said.

“You almost sound angry at him,” I said. “At Joshua.”

“I am angry at him,” Martina said, with more heat than I’d expected. “He wrote a night down like it was a meeting and never said a word to you.”

I hadn’t let myself be. I turned the permission over in my mind, tentatively, the way you test the give of ice before you put your full weight on it.

The morning was very quiet.

I thought about Joshua. About the notebook. About wonderful and beginning written in the handwriting of a man who documented everything with the detachment of an auditor.

I thought about what I was afraid of and whether the fear was about the result or about what the result would require of me.

It was both.

I looked at Martina.

“I need to let it happen,” I said. “Don’t I.”

She set her cup down. “Some questions,” she said, “don’t get answered in the asking.”

I looked at her.

“They get answered in the living,” she said.

I’d heard that before.