Page 91 of Knocked Up

I noted it at eight in the morning the way I note weather. Water, I thought. You are thirty-six weeks pregnant and you have not sat down since Tuesday.

At the party it was still there.

By half past three the lights in that bar had gone soft around the edges, not blurred. There is a difference and I have been describing it to clients for nine years. Every bulb in the room had a small clean ring around it, like a streetlight in fog. When I looked away from one, a pale shape stayed where it had been for a second.

I sat in the chair and did what I do, which is build the case. Fluorescents. Not enough water. A long week. The noise. You are fine.

Sofia was on the other side of the bar with a plate in her hand, and she stopped.

She did not ask me anything. That is the part I keep thinking about. A sixty-eight-year-old woman looked at my face across a room with seventy people in it and put the plate down.

She came around the bar and picked my bag up off the floor. She took out the cuff that lives in it, took my arm and put it on. She did it right there, sitting down in a bar with a banner up.

"Sofia, it's…"

"Be quiet," Sofia said.

The machine did its thing. She read it and did not say the number. She put it back on and did it again on the other arm, which nobody does unless they want to be wrong.

Then she said, "Tessa," in a voice I have not heard her use.

"Say it."

"One seventy over one hundred and eight."

Mateo drew a red circle on a piece of paper in November and wrote a number in it. I have looked at that paper twice a day for six months.

"Where is he?" Sofia said. Beckett was already coming across that room, because he had turned around. That man has been watching me since October and I have never once caught him at it.

Beckett crouched down in front of my chair so his face was below mine, which I have watched him do to frightened dogs.

"Say it to me," he said.

"One seventy over one oh eight."

Nothing in his voice moved. "Mateo said call the service and go in. Not in the morning."

"That's what he said."

"Then that's what we're doing." He put one hand on the arm of the chair. "Can you walk out of here or do you want to not walk out of here?"

"I can walk."

"All right."

"I don't want the room to…"

"Nobody's going to know anything," he said, and stood up, and put his hand out.

And that is exactly what happened. He walked me out of the front of that bar with a hand on my back, like a man taking a woman out to look at something. Behind us Auggie's voice went up over the whole room, saying he had an announcement about the sandwiches. Violet had a phone to her ear before we were through the door. Sofia came out behind us with my bag and my chart and got in the back seat without being asked.

Eli was in the doorway of his own bar with a dish towel in his hand and his face gone.

"Go back inside," Sofia said to him.

"That's not…"

"Eli," Beckett said, and my brother stopped. "Bar first, then Federal. Feed everything. Then come."