Chapter 2: Three Lines in the Tile
The guest bathroom of the historic brownstone in Brooklyn was cold. Elena sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub, the sky-blue dress pooling like spilled water across the white hexagonal tile. Her shivering was uncontrollable now, a deep, primal shudder that vibrated through her jaw and knees.
On the marble washstand beside her lay three plastic test sticks.
Under the glare of the overhead vanity bulb, the double pink lines on each stick were crisp, unforgiving, and vibrant. Two weeks past due. The nausea she had attributed to stress during Dante’s public share offering had a heartbeat.
Two heartbeats, the clinic nurse had suspected that morning when reviewing her hormone panels.
"Dante," Elena choked out into the empty room, pressing her left palm flat against the silk covering her lower abdomen. "You can never know."
Her phone buzzed continuously on the floor: seventeen missed calls, five voice memos, twelve text notifications lighting up the screen with frantic variations of Answer me, please, let me explain, I was out of my mind.
She picked up the phone. Her fingers were steady now, driven by the cold survival instinct that takes over when a house burns down. She removed the SIM card, snapped the plastic between her thumb and forefinger, and dropped the fragments into the wastebasket.
Her mother’s sister, Nora, an archivist who lived on a quiet coastal farm in Maine, had left the spare bedroom open for her ever since Elena’s mother died three winters ago. Nora did not ask questions; Nora believed that women had a right to their silence until the storm passed.
Elena stood up, looking at her reflection in the oval mirror. Her blonde hair was falling from its pins, her mascara smudged along her cheekbones, but beneath the ruin, her hazel-blue eyes were hardening into stone.
May you like
She changed out of the evening gown into an oversized wool fisherman's sweater, faded jeans, and her father’s old leather duffel bag. She packed two pairs of boots, three sketchpads, her passport, and six thousand dollars she had kept in an emergency cash envelope in her jewelry box.
She left the diamond wedding band resting precisely in the center of the marble sink.
