*Seven years ago*
The pregnancy test rests on my knee, balanced there like an accusation.
It is still slightly damp from the counter where I set it down, and the plastic edge digs into my thigh through the thin fabric of my jeans.
Two lines. Parallel and precise and unavoidable.
And my first coherent thought is about Finn. About the low build of his laugh and the way I have spent years pretending it doesn't reach all the way through me.
The shame arrives immediately.
Stop it. You're on a bathroom floor with another man's baby inside you, thinking about someone who doesn't even know you love him.
Last weekend's party presses in before I could stop it.
I'd stood near the kitchen doorway with a drink I wasn't tasting. The noise of the party was pressing in from all sides—someone's playlist too loud, conversation layered over conversation until it became an undifferentiated blur.
I remember watching Finn across the room with Serena Owens. She was so beautiful and effortlessly polished, her cashmere sweater and inherited confidence as natural as a second skin. Nothing like me.
Her hand was resting on his forearm as though she had always had the right to put it there. And looking at them, I finally name what I've been circling for years without landing on.
I am completely, pathetically in love with my best friend.
And I can't do anything about it. Not with the class difference.
Girls from trailer parks with secondhand textbooks don't end up with men like Finn Howell. They end up exactly where I am now. On a bathroom floor at twenty-two, pregnant and dreaming of a man whose orbit they were never meant to enter.
A knock at the door. "Aubrey? You've been in there a while. Everything okay, babe?"
I open the door to the hallway of Daniel's apartment. His gaze drops to the test in my hand, then back to mine.
"I'm pregnant," I say, because there is no softer way to place it.
Daniel goes still. The stillness is total—no shift of weight, no exhale, nothing. Just the sound of the refrigerator humming from the kitchen and the city traffic five floors below.
Then something moves behind his eyes. Something that isn't tenderness.
"Is it mine?"
"What?"
"You heard me." His jaw tightens. "You and Finn, you've always been…" He stops and starts again quieter. "He's always there, Aubrey. Every day, every bad week, every time you need someone at two in the morning. So I'm asking."
Finn. Of course it comes back to Finn.
I think of the reason I swiped right on Daniel six months ago. How I met him at some party, watching Finn across the room with another girl, telling myself I needed someone real, someone safe.
Someone who would make me feel the way Finn did without even trying.
I chose Daniel precisely because he wasn't Finn. Because I thought I could outrun something that had no intention of being outrun.
"The baby is yours." My voice is steady even as everything else in me isn't. "I've never cheated on you."
He holds my gaze, searching for the crack in it. He doesn't find one.
Something releases in his shoulders. "Then we should get married."
Not 'I love you.' Not 'whatever you need.' Just obligation, assembled into the shape of a proposal. "Daniel…"
"No." He steps forward and takes both my hands in his. His hands are warm, steadier than mine. "I'm not asking because I have to. I'm asking because I'm not the kind of man who lets the woman carrying his child stand alone in a hallway being scared."
"You were just accusing me."
"I know." His thumb moves across my knuckles, an apology without the word. "I'm sorry, I just needed to hear it." His voice drops lower. "You don't have to worry about anything. I'll take care of you, both of you. That I can promise."
I look at this man — imperfect, jealous, real — and feel the weight of another name pressing quietly against my ribs. "I'm scared…"
"Me too." His voice loses its composure—not much, just enough to become real. "But scared and alone are two different things. You don't have to be both."
I look at this man who will become my husband and feel the weight of another name, buried somewhere I cannot reach.
"Yes," I say. Because this is the life I deserve.
Because Finn was never going to say it first anyway.
The weeks that follow dissolve. I withdraw from my final semester, and the ring appears on my finger before I've fully absorbed any of it. It sits slightly loose and I turn it with my thumb when my hands have nothing else to do.
Finn showed up at my apartment one afternoon with two coffees unannounced, because presence was always enough between us—no prior agreement required.
"I feel like you've been avoiding me," he says from the doorway. There's no accusation in it, just confusion that has been building for weeks. "And I can't figure out why."
"I haven't been avoiding you." I lean against the frame, keeping myself in the gap. I don't take the coffee he's offering. I don't trust my hands not to tremble. "Things have been… complicated."
"Complicated how? Two weeks ago everything was fine." He tilts his head, and his hazel eyes carry bewilderment like he is turning over a puzzle he can't solve. "I don't understand what changed."
"Finn." I keep my voice even. "I'm fine. I just need some time to work through a few things."
"You don't work through things alone, without me. That's the point of me." He holds my gaze—not pushing, just persistent. "Whatever it is, you don't have to manage it by yourself. You know that."
That's the problem.
If I didn't manage it alone, I'd say everything I'm not supposed to say. And everything falls apart.
"I'm really busy right now, I'll call you next week," I say. "I promise."
"That's the fifth time this month you've said next week." He says it quietly, without accusation. "I'll wait, whatever you need. But I need you to know that I'm here."
"I know you are," I say. And mean it, and close the door anyway.
The click of the latch is the quietest sound I have ever heard.
After that I let the next call go to voicemail. Then the next. The next ones, all of them. The spaces between his attempts stretch longer until they become their own kind of answer.
When I don't invite him to my wedding, his name stops appearing on my phone. The silence settles, and I teach myself to breathe through the absence of him.
I thought everything's gonna be fine from now on. Then, at fourteen weeks, I wake before dawn to pain.
It begins low and insistent and I lie still for a moment. Hoping it will relent, listening to Daniel's even breathing beside me, to the pre-dawn quiet of the street below.
Then the cramping deepens, and I just knew.
The body doesn't negotiate. Daniel drove me to the hospital without speaking, and I watched the city blur past the window and felt the grief unfolding through me in waves too vast to contain.
The baby was gone.
The only reason any of it happened—the ring, the silence, the boy who stopped calling… is gone.
Daniel brought me home in the early morning and made a tea steaming on the table between us, untouched until it went cold. He sits across from me at the kitchen table.
"We can try again," he says finally. "When you're ready, there's no rush."
"I know," I say, but the words come out hollow in a way I didn't intend.
He studies me from across the table. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"No." I look at the ring on my finger and think of Finn because grief always finds the wound it fits best. "Not tonight."
"Okay." His voice is careful, measured. "I'm here whenever you do."
I shouldn't have believed him back then.
I should've left him and gone back to finish college and get the job and… do literally anything else when there was nothing that bound me to him anymore. I should've run right then.
But I believed, I hoped. I thought I finally loved someone who is not Finn, who'd be good for me.
And then my nightmare of a marriage began.