Chapter 13: The Clock

She missed the period on schedule — I’d kept my own count running since the water, same as I told her I would — and said nothing to me about it for four days, which told me plenty on its own. Val digging in on a thing alone instead of bringing it straight to me was new. She’d learned that from somewhere, and I didn’t think it was Alexis.

On the fifth day I found the box in the bathroom trash, buried under tissue the way a fifteen-year-old buries a thing she doesn’t actually believe is hidden. A store brand, the receipt still folded inside the wrapper — cash, the drugstore three miles out she must have walked to and back on some excuse I hadn’t bothered tracking, careful even now, still trying to run her own operation instead of coming to the man who actually knew how.

I didn’t say anything about it that night. I wanted to see how long she’d carry it alone before it broke her.

Four more days. Then she came and found me in the garage on a Sunday, Brenda at the store, and stood in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself the way she used to on the ship, and I watched her jaw work the old tell one more time before she got it out.

“It’s real.” Flat, and then not flat at all, her voice going somewhere underneath the flat and cracking through it. “I took the test. Twice. It’s — Dad, it’s real.”

I put down the wrench I wasn’t using for anything and crossed the garage and held her, and felt her shake against me, and didn’t say the thing I’d been ready to say for weeks now, because a woman doesn’t need the plan handed to her the second the fear lands. She needs the fear held first.

“Okay,” I said, into her hair. “Okay. We knew this might happen. We’re going to be okay.”

“I looked stuff up.” Muffled, into my shirt. “There’s — I found this whole thing online about what your options actually are, like, legally, in this state, and there’s a clinic forty minutes from here that doesn’t need a parent’s, um, doesn’t need you to—” She stopped herself, pulled back enough to look at me, checking whether she’d already gone too far just by saying it out loud.

She’d gone and built herself a whole exit on her own, quietly, days before she ever brought the news to me. I felt something sharp and almost admiring go through me at that — my girl, still capable of running her own numbers even scared out of her mind — right alongside the cold certainty that it wasn’t going anywhere.

“We’re not doing that,” I said. Gentle, but with no give in it anywhere. “I told you back on the boat. If it’s real, we keep it. That hasn’t changed because you found a website.”

“I know what you said.” Her chin came up. “I just wanted you to know I looked. That I know there’s an option, even if you don’t want to talk about it. I’m not stupid, Dad. I know things.”

“I never once thought you were stupid.” I held her face in both hands. “I think you’re scared, and smart, and doing the only thing a smart, scared person knows how to do, which is go find out everything there is to find out. That’s not nothing. I’m proud of you for it, even if the answer’s still no.”

She didn’t have anything to say back to that. She just stood there a long moment with my hands on her face, working the truth of it — that she’d built a door and found it locked from the other side before she’d even reached the handle — and then she let her forehead drop against my chest and didn’t fight it anymore, not that day.

The first night after the garage I braced for the flinch out of pure habit — the shoulders drawing up, the small recoil at the first touch that I’d been getting off her since the boat. It didn’t come. The worst thing she’d braced against every single night had already happened; there was nothing left to dread on that score. She lay still while I drew the sheet back off her, and when it was over she didn’t turn to the wall. I’d been waiting on that — the night her body finally came over to my side and stopped checking with her first.

I called Charles two nights later, out on the back porch with Brenda asleep and the neighborhood gone quiet, his number still sitting in my phone under a name that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who found it. He picked up on the second ring, like he’d been waiting on it far longer than he actually had.

“Frank.” Flat, unsurprised, the same voice from the rail bar and the terminal. “Took you long enough.”

“It’s real.” I kept my own voice down, though there was nobody in fifty feet of me to hear it. “Confirmed. Twice, apparently.”

“Congratulations.” He said it the way he’d said everything on that boat — no more weight on the word than the situation strictly required, and somehow that was worse than if he’d laughed. “How’s she taking it.”

“About how you’d expect.”