Page 226 of ClickBack

“What does she want now?”

“Time. For me to leave it alone until she’s ready. She has his picture.”

Jarrett draws out a chair. “Come sit.”

I sit beside him. He turns toward me, one elbow on the table.

“I keep thinking about her being twelve,” I say. “Looking up when the phone rang. I let her think there could be a call.”

He takes my hand then. I cover his with my other one and look at our fingers until I can speak again.

“Are you wondering what else I could keep from somebody?”

He takes his time answering.

“I’m thinking you’ve been scared of telling me since last night.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“I heard what you asked.” He turns my hand over. “I don’t like that she had to wait this long. I also watched you go over there and tell her something you knew might cost you. I’m sitting with all of it, Zel.”

I nod. His answer is harder to hear than a reassurance would have been. It is also one I believe.

He picks up the sandwich bag. “Which one’s yours?”

“The one without tomato.”

He checks, gives it to me, then opens his own. We eat at my kitchen table. I don’t apologize for crying again halfway through mine, and he doesn’t make me stop before he asks whether I want the other napkin.

Chapter 38

Giselle

Sutton is coming out of the practice when I arrive for my appointment.

She doesn’t see me. I am at the far end of the check-in desk, trying to separate my insurance card from a receipt that has worked its way into the same slot. She walks past with her phone in one hand and a strip of ultrasound pictures in the other.

Her phone rings. She tucks the pictures into her tote, smiling as she answers.

“I was just about to send them.”

That is all I hear. She keeps walking toward the elevators, her free hand coming to rest low on her stomach. By the time I have my insurance card out, the doors have opened for her.

“Ms. Dawkins?”

“Sorry.” I pass the card across the counter.

The receptionist asks whether my address has changed. It hasn’t. My employer hasn’t changed. My emergency contact is still Rae, and when she asks whether I want to update that, I say no, then wonder how far away a person has to live before the answer should be different.

I sit near the window. There is a magazine on the table with a woman smiling beside a kitchen nobody has used. I pick it up and read the same caption twice.

Sutton is pregnant.

Or at least she has left a gynecologist’s office delighted with ultrasound pictures and touching her stomach. I have enough information to hurt my own feelings without conducting an investigation.

I look toward the elevators again. She is gone.

For years, Byron could make later sound like a promise. After the promotion. When Rae was a little older. Once we had the house the way we wanted it. He would pull me against him and talk about a baby with my eyes, then the conversation would disappear until I brought it back.