Page 46 of Knocked Up

"What do you want," she said.

"I don't know."

"That's allowed."

"I know it's allowed. I'm a doctor. I know exactly what all of this is and what the options are. I've said the words out loud to other people in rooms." I put the heels of my hands against my eyes. "I'm not asking anybody what to do. This is mine. I'm going to work it out in my own time and by my own arithmetic. I'm not going to be talked into one thing by anybody, including you."

"I heard you," she said. "And for the record, I wasn't going to."

"You were going to say something."

"It's not what you think," Violet said. "I was going to say you have spent nine years being the person who does the hard part alone, and that I've watched it. And that if you tell me to go home right now, I will go home. And also that I'm not going home."

Two things I decided that night, sitting on a bucket.

Eli cannot know yet. That's not forever. That's until I know what I'm doing. The second my brother knows he will build his entire life around it inside a week, the way he does. He will drop shifts and be here every night. I've spent nine years keeping that boy's life from being a support beam under mine. He gets to be twenty-one a little while longer.

And Beckett has to be told.

I did not want that one. I turned it over about nine ways looking for a version where I didn't. I found four. Every one of them was me deciding on my own what somebody else is allowed to know about their own life. That is the exact thing that was done to me in a gravel parking lot when I was twenty-one. I will not be that.

So he gets told, when I'm ready and not before, in a room I choose.

That's the deal I made with myself on a bucket at nine at night.

Violet left at ten. She hugged me too hard, twice. She stood in the lot with the car door open and said, "Text me when you're in bed." I said, "I'm not going to." She said, "I know, but say you will." I said, "I will."

Then I went back into the supply room, because I had left three tests on the lip of a sink like an idiot. The last thing this building needed was Marisol finding that at seven in the morning.

I picked them up and stood there holding them and did the math again. Not the backwards math, the other one.

Nine weeks now, which made it the last week of June.

June. I stood in a fluorescent supply closet in a building with my mother's name over the door. It landed on me sideways at nine forty at night. I had to put a hand on the shelf.

I put my other hand flat on my stomach, which was a stupid thing to do. There was nothing there yet and nothing to feel. I knew that better than almost anybody alive.

I did it anyway. I stood there a while like that.

It was dread, about eighty percent of it. The other twenty was something I had no intention of naming in a supply closet.

Then I went out through the lobby to lock the front.

There was a bag on the ledge under the mail slot with a container in it. The container was cold. There was no note on it and there did not need to be.

I stood at my own front door with a bag of soup in one hand and three pieces of plastic in the other. I said out loud, to a lobby with six empty chairs in it, "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

Chapter 13: Tessa

I decided on a Thursday. It did not feel like deciding. It felt like noticing.

I had been running the numbers for days. What a person costs in the first year. What an eight-week leave does to a single-doctor practice. How many overnights I could give up before the fosters started dying on me.

And then at four in the morning I was in the treatment room with a bottle in one hand and a three-week-old in the other. I reached past the coffee I was not drinking and took a prenatal vitamin out of a bottle Violet left on the shelf. I got it into my mouth before I understood that I had been doing it every morning for days.

So that was the decision. It had been made by somebody who works here. She hadn't filed the paperwork.

"Okay," I said, to a kitten.