Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
He brings me ginger tea for the nausea.
Not in person. I find it outside my door in the morning. A thermos, stainless steel, warm to the touch. The first morning I open my door and see it, I stand in the hallway a long moment holding the thermos and staring at it and my eyes burn and I carry it inside and I drink it and the ginger settles my stomach and I hate him for knowing what I need before I ask.
Prenatal vitamins appear in my kitchen. I don’t buy them. They’re on the counter one afternoon when I come home from a walk, the right brand, the right dosage, the ones the doctor recommended by name in the appointment he took notes during. He has a key to my unit, the building management gave him one as the owner, and he used it to leave vitamins on my counter and nothing else. No note. No flowers. No apology tucked inside a gesture. Just vitamins.
He doesn’t push. He doesn’t charm. For the first time since I’ve known him, he just shows up. And it’s killing me.
Because every morning the ginger tea is there. Every appointment he is in the waiting room. Every evening I hear his footsteps two floors above me, a faint rhythm through the ceiling, and I know the rhythm the way I know my own pulse and I press my hand against the wall above my bed where the plaster vibrates with his pacing and I don’t let myself want what I want.
The elevator is the worst.
The building has one private lift. We share it. And the encounters are accidental and unavoidable and each one is a small catastrophe. He steps in, I step back. I press my floor, he presses his. We stand in a glass box rising through a building in Monaco and we don’t speak and the distance between us is three feet and three feet in an elevator is nothing and everything.
His hand brushes mine reaching for the button. My shoulder touches his when the lift jolts between floors. He holds the door for me and his arm is above my head and I walk beneath it and his cologne catches me, cedar and smoke and the darker thing, and I’m carrying his child and I can’t breathe in a lift that smells like him and I grip my keys and I walk to my door and I don’t look back.
He never looks back either. But I hear him stand in the hallway after the lift doors close. I hear him not move. And then, after a pause that lasts exactly as long as it takes for a man to decide not to knock, I hear his footsteps return to the lift, and the doors open, and he goes up.
Every time. He almost knocks. Every time, he doesn’t.
And every morning, the ginger tea is there.
ANTON
She’s five months along and she’s glowing and I’m dying.
I make the tea before dawn. I carry it downstairs. I set it outside her door. I go back up. I make my own coffee and I drink it at the window and I count the minutes until I hear her door open below me, the sound carries through the building’s bones, a faint click and a pause and then the soft scrape of the thermos being lifted, and the pause is the part that guts me. The pause where she stands in her doorway holding what I’ve left her and decides whether to carry it inside or pour it out.
She has never poured it out.
I hold on to that. In the dark hours between the tea and the morning, when I pace the penthouse and my footsteps echo and the harbour burns below me and I think about a girl who smiled at me in the aftermath of the worst thing I’ve ever done, I hold on to the fact that she has never poured out the tea.
The elevator encounters are exquisite torture. Three feet. Glass walls. Her perfume and her growing belly and her hands gripping her keys and her eyes that find everything in the lift except me. She is building a life two floors below mine and I can hear it through the ceiling, music sometimes, or the sound of her phone, or the particular rhythm of someone moving through rooms who is learning to be alone again, and I don’t interfere.
I’ve learned, at a cost I’ll carry for the rest of my life, that I don’t get to decide what she wants.
DAISY
Tuesday evening. The lobby.
I’m coming back from a walk. The air is good for the nausea and the movement is good for my back and the walks are getting longer because my body is changing and the changing requires movement and space and the freedom of streets that don’t belong to anyone.