Page 31 of Until You

I close my eyes. The Polaroid is still in my hand. I can feel the waxy surface of it against my fingertips.

“If I tell him,” I say quietly, “he’s going to want me gone.”

Silence on the line.

“You don’t know that,” Hope says.

“I know how it looks, Hope. Single girl with no family, no real ties, shows up in a small town and moves in with two elderly people? And oh, by the way, she’s pregnant by their grandson?” I let out a breath that tastes bitter. “How do you think it looks when I add and I’m having your grandson’s baby to the equation?”

“It looks like the truth,” Hope says.

“The truth doesn’t matter when the optics are this bad.”

“Since when do you care about optics?” Jules asks.

“Since I found something I don’t want to lose!” The words come out louder than I intend. Sharper. They hang in the air of my little room—the good guest room, the one with the rain showerhead, the one Mimz gave me without hesitation.

I press my fingers to my eyes.

“I like it here, Jules. I like this house. I like this town. I like that Pops leaves me the crossword every morning with the easy ones already filled in because he thinks I don’t notice. I like that Mimz texts me pictures of the ocean even though I told her I’m fine. I like that the third floorboard from the kitchen creaks, and I know it, and I step on it anyway because it sounds like⁠—”

I stop.

Home.

It sounds like home.

“It sounds like what?” Hope asks softly.

“Nothing.” I swallow. “The point is, I want to finish this slideshow. I want to give them something beautiful for their anniversary. And then... then I’ll tell him. When Mimz and Pops are back. When there are other people in the house. When I have witnesses.”

“You don’t need witnesses, Cora. You need courage.”

“Courage and witnesses aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Jules sighs. Long and heavy. The sigh of a woman who has loved me through every bad decision I’ve ever made and is watching me make another one in slow motion.

“One week,” she says.

“What?”

“I’m giving you a week. Mimz and Pops get back, you finish the slideshow, y’all have your anniversary party, and then you tell him. If you haven’t told him by then, Hope and I are driving down there and doing it for you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.” A pause. “We love you, Cora. But this man has a right to know. And you know that, which is why you feel guilty, which is why you’re burying yourself in a photo project at ten o’clock at night instead of walking down the hall and knocking on his door.”

I look at the thin strip of light glowing under my closed door.

Down that hallway, behind another closed door, Oliver is doing whatever Oliver does in the evenings. I heard him come in an hour ago. The microwave had hummed. Two minutes. The plate I’d left—tonight it was pot roast, because I’d found Mimz’s recipe and I’d had a craving and I’d made enough for four people even though there are only two of us—was probably empty by now. Washed. In the rack.

He’s right there.

Thirty feet and one conversation away from knowing everything.

“One week,” I say.

“And not a day more,” Hope adds.