Chapter 15: The Table

Priya’s period was four days late, and then it was a week, and I watched her come apart by inches.

She’d been so sure of herself going down those stairs, so far past every warning I’d thrown at her, and now she texted me at two in the morning — still nothing. wren. still nothing — and showed up white-faced at the nursery on my shifts and followed me down the rows of seedlings whispering the same numbers over and over, like saying them enough times would move them. She’d done the exact thing I’d tried to keep her from, and now she was living in the after of it. And the after was the one I’d been living in myself since September — except she got to say hers out loud to somebody, and I had to stand there and be the somebody and act like I was hearing any of it new.

I told her what I knew. That the morning-after pill was already days too late, that it only worked in the first day or two and she’d waited out the window without ever knowing there was a window to wait out. That most of the time it’s nothing, that a scared body will hold the blood back on its own, that being this frightened could be the whole reason she was late. All the true, useless things you say to somebody while the two of you wait on a thing neither of you can lay a hand on. What I didn’t tell her — what I sat on with everything I had — was the one fact that would have made her scare a hundred times worse than it already was. Not just whether. Whose.

Because I had a name for whose — the one that had come up the night it happened and wouldn’t go back down. All week I’d told myself it was only fear talking, that I owed the man the doubt, and I’d almost had myself believing it.

Thanksgiving landed in the dead middle of the wait.

The two families always did it together — had since before Priya’s mother left, and after she left there was no version where Ravi and Priya did a turkey for two in that quiet house, so they came to us. To Robin’s house. To Robin’s table — the long one the old circle had sat around for years, the same wood some of them had planned the reunion over. Claire cooked for three days. Dad put the leaf in the table and carved. And I set out plates for the two families like it was any other year, and sat down in the one seat at that table nobody would ever have put me in on purpose — between Priya and her father.

Priya was too bright beside me from the second she sat down — laughing too fast, talking over everybody, running her mouth the way she only ever did when she was scared out of her skin. She’d been white and sick all week over a blood that wouldn’t come, and she’d walked in tonight and turned all that fear into noise, the way you do at a table full of grown-ups who can’t know. So she chattered and she laughed, and it was a performance with only one person in the room who could see the underside of it.