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I become suddenly, violently aware of everything. The fact that my bra is hanging from the doorknob of the closet because I threw it there last night in a gesture of exhausted rebellion.
“Kitchen table?” she asks.
“It’s also my dining table, study table, and occasionally my will-to-live station, but yes.”
No reaction. Fine.
I sit down and push aside a stack of notes. Petra sets the case on the table and opens it. Inside are tubes, gloves, alcohol swabs, labels, a small sharps container. Everything neat. Everything in its proper place.
A nurse steps in behind her, who I somehow had not noticed because my brain was still recovering from the part where I thought my anonymous one-night stand had tracked me down through emotional GPS.
“Good morning, Maggie,” the nurse says.
She’s warmer than Petra. Everyone is warmer than Petra. Refrigerated vaccines are warmer than Petra.
“Morning.”
“We’ll just take a small sample today,” she says. “Then the lab will run the beta hCG.”
I nod.
Beta hCG. The pregnancy hormone. The answer, in a tube.
Two weeks of waiting, compressed into a needle and a number.
My stomach tightens.
The nurse ties the band around my arm, taps for a vein, cleans the skin. I look away when the needle goes in, not because I’m squeamish, but because watching my own blood leave my body feels too symbolic this morning.
The nurse packs the tube into the little transport case and snaps it shut.
That’s it. Two weeks of waiting, and the answer will leave my apartment in a vial smaller than my thumb.
I keep pressing the cotton ball to the inside of my elbow even after the nurse tells me I can stop. It gives my hand something to do. Without it, I might start pacing. Or crying. Or opening my phone and staring at D’s name like that will solve anything.
Petra stands by my kitchen table with her tablet tucked against her side. “The sample will be prioritized,” she says. “We should have the result by late afternoon.”
Late afternoon.
My stomach tightens.
“Okay.”
“Mr. Chandler would like to meet this evening once the result is available.”
I look up. “Meet?”
“At his residence.”
That makes me sit straighter. “Why?”
Petra’s face remains calm. “He prefers to discuss the outcome in person.”
“The outcome,” I repeat.
“Yes.”
I look at the cotton ball under my fingers.
