Two hours passed. The sun began to dip below the tree line, casting long, bruised shadows across the parking lot. My phone buzzed three more times, but I kept it on silent. My eyes were fixed on the entrance of building four.
At exactly six-thirty, a familiar silver pickup truck pulled into the lot.
My heart did a strange, violent flip against my ribs. Garrett got out of the driver’s seat. He wasn’t wearing his usual work boots; he had on the casual loafers I bought him for his birthday. He reached into the truck bed and pulled out a heavy bag of groceries and a brand-new, flat-packed cardboard box that showed a picture of a white wooden bassinet on the side.
He didn’t look like a man under stress. He looked relaxed. He looked like a man coming home.
A moment later, the glass door of building four opened. A young woman with long, dark hair and a visibly round belly stepped out onto the concrete walkway. She smiled when she saw him, holding the door open so he could manage the heavy box. Garrett stopped, set the box down for a brief second, and leaned in to kiss her forehead before picking it up again and following her inside.
The door clicked shut behind them.
I sat in the dark of my car, the air conditioning humming softly against the silence. The woman, Tanya, looked happy. She looked exactly the way I had imagined looking in another twelve weeks—safe, cared for, and expectant.
I looked down at my stomach. The miracle was still there, completely independent of the wreckage outside.
I realized then that the version of Emily who made things easy was gone. She had stayed behind in the clinic room with the seven seagulls. The woman sitting in the car now had a child to think about, a future to secure, and a decades-worth of lies to dismantle.
I put the car in reverse, backed out of the space, and turned on my headlights. I had a long drive back, and for the first time in ten years, I knew exactly what I had to do.
