Page 47 of Until You

The silence coming from Cora stretches.

One second. Two. Three.

Dolores looks up from her tablet.

Cora meets the nurse’s eyes, and I watch her—even from behind, even from six feet away, I can see the moment she stops calculating escape routes and accepts that there aren’t any.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dolores says, gently. “How far along?”

“About fourteen weeks.” Cora’s voice is barely above a whisper. Barely holding. “I think.”

I stare at the curtain.

Fourteen weeks.

The math is instantaneous and merciless. Fourteen weeks. Three and a half months. A rainy night. A gravel lot by a river. A truck cab with fogged windows and a box of condoms my siblings had thought was hilarious.

Fourteen weeks.

She has been living in my grandparents’ house, making my dinner, leaving me notes in purple ink, scanning photographs of people she barely knows until ten o’clock at night—and she has been carrying this. Alone. For the entire time I’ve been there.

Dolores says something about bloodwork. Something about iron and blood sugar. She pats Cora’s knee and disappears through the curtain.

The curtain falls back into place.

The fluorescent light hums.

A machine beeps somewhere down the hall.

Me and Cora and fourteen weeks and the loudest silence I’ve ever stood inside.

“Fourteen weeks,” I say.

I hear the words come out of my own mouth and I don’t recognize my voice. Flat. Measured. Like I’m reading a number off a gauge. Like I haven’t just had the ground kicked out from under me.

She doesn’t turn around. Her hands are in her lap, and her shoulders are up around her ears, and she is bracing. I can see it in every line of her. She is bracing for the thing she has been waiting for since the night I walked through that front door. The demand. The accusation. The fencepost delivery of I think it’s best if you find somewhere else to stay.

“Cora.”

Nothing.

“Look at me.”

Her head shakes. Small, tight. No.

I move. Boots on linoleum, crossing the small space between us. I pull the plastic chair from the wall and set it beside her wheelchair and sit, my knee pressing against hers.

She makes a small sound. Not quite a word. Like the contact cost her something she didn’t have to spare.

“I was going to tell you.” Her voice is barely audible. “After the party. I had a plan. I was going to sit you down and be calm and rational, and I—” Something breaks in the middle of it. Right in the middle, clean through. “I wasn’t hiding it to hurt you. I was hiding it because I was terrified.”

“Terrified of what?”

She finally looks at me.

And it costs her. I can see exactly how much it costs her — the looking, the being seen, the risk of it. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her mascara has tracked down both cheeks, and she is the least put-together I’ve ever seen her. And yet, she is beautiful. A beautiful mess that I want to gather in my arms and hold until that sadness seeps from her face, from her posture, from her very bones.

“Of you making me leave.”