Page 36 of Babies for the Boss
I don’t answer. He doesn’t expect me to. It’s the kind of question he asks not because he needs the answer but because he believes I should hear it out loud, and after eleven years I have learned that Igor is usually right about what I need to hear, even when I would prefer not to hear it.
We walk in silence after that. The city moves around us, enormous and indifferent, full of people whose lives have nothing to do with what just happened in that restaurant. I think about Molly at her desk right now, resolving some scheduling conflict with the pleasant immovability she brings to everything, completely unaware that her name was in Yuri Snigir’s mouth twenty minutes ago.
Safe. He used her safety as a threat and I crossed a table without deciding to, which is all the answer Igor’s question requires, and we both know it.
Everyone is beginning to notice Molly.
I’ve been circling the real decision for weeks, telling myself that protocols were enough, that Vet was enough, that the distanceI maintained in public was sufficient cover for what I couldn’t make myself give up in private.
Snigir sitting across from me with bread in his hand and Molly’s name hanging in the air between us has ended that particular argument.
I will need to make the decision. The real one, not the version I’ve been rehearsing.
I already know what it is.
I walk, and the city offers nothing, and the knowing sits in my chest alongside everything else I carry, heavy and impatient, waiting for me to stop pretending I haven’t already made it.
13
MOLLY
Vet takesone look at me when I walk in and says, “You look like shit.”
She’s already at the coffee machine, and she turns to assess me with those quiet brown eyes the way she assesses everything—completely and without sentiment—and apparently what she finds in my face warrants a direct opening statement rather than a good morning.
“Thank you,” I say, setting my bag down. “I’m aware.”
“You didn’t sleep.”
“I slept a little.”
“You slept badly and briefly, which is not the same as sleeping.” She hands me my coffee, looks at me for another moment with that unhurried calculation, and then does something unexpected. She opens her desk drawer, produces a slim paper bag, and sets it on my desk.
I look inside it, and my stomach drops. Then I look at her.
“Just to rule it out,” she says, and turns back to her computer as though she has said something entirely unremarkable.
I stare at the pregnancy test in its paper bag for a full five seconds. Then I feel the heat climb my face in a wave so thorough it reaches my ears. “How did you—I haven’t said anything about… How did you even know that I was…”
Vet turns back to face me with an expression of serene patience. “Molly. My survival has depended, on many occasions, on my ability to read people accurately and quickly.”
I open my mouth. Close it. “How did you figure it out?”
She nods toward the paper bag. “Go.”
She’s right. It doesn’t matter. I pick up the bag and go.
The bathroom at the end of the hall is single occupancy, which I’m grateful for, because what follows is not a performance I could have managed with an audience. I read the instructions twice despite having a general working knowledge of how pregnancy tests function, because my brain has decided that this is the moment to become very literal and methodical, which is what my brain does when it’s quietly catastrophizing and needs to feel like it’s doing something useful.
I read them a third time. The instructions have not changed.
I am, as suspected, perfectly capable of operating a pregnancy test without additional guidance, and the extra read was purely a stalling mechanism, which I acknowledge and then proceed past.
I take the test and set it on the edge of the sink. The ceiling becomes very interesting as I wait and breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. I remind myself that theentire point of this exercise is to rule it out, which is what Vet said, which means she expects it to be negative, which means it will probably be negative, which means I’m standing in the office bathroom at eight forty-five in the morning having a controlled panic response over a formality that will resolve itself in approximately three minutes and then I can go back to my desk and drink my coffee and have a normal day.
When the timer on my phone goes off, I look down.
I am never having another normal day in my life. Two lines.
