Page 47 of Angel
“I feel different,” I admit.
“Better?” I consider that.
“Braver,” I say finally.
She smiles like that’s enough. When I text Angel, my thumb doesn’t shake.
I think I’m ready to come home. Not to pretend everything’s okay, just to be there.
The reply comes fast.
Whenever you’re ready. I’ll meet you where you are.
I smile, small and real. That’s the thing about him. He doesn’t promise to fix but to stand with me.
The house looks the same when I unlock the door. Same scuffed baseboards. Same crooked picture frame in the hallway we never straightened. Same faint scent of coffee and motor oil and us. But I’m different.
I close the door behind me and let the silence wrap around me. It doesn’t feel hostile anymore. It feels… waiting.I walk through each room slowly. The kitchen where we fought, the couch where we remembered each other. The hallway where I walked out. Nothing has moved. But everything has shifted.
I set my bag down and head straight to the bathroom. This part I’ve been rehearsing in my head. I open drawers. Cabinets. The little woven basket under the sink. Out come the ovulation sticks. The half-used boxes of pregnancy tests. The pamphlets from clinics and pharmacies and nurses who meant well. The supplements I swallowed are like confession.
I line them all up on the counter. It’s not dramatic or angry.Just deliberate.
“I don’t hate you,” I murmur, touching the edge of one box. “But you don’t get to run my life anymore.”
I remember the version of me who clutched these like lifelines, believed control was survival. One by one, I drop them into a trash bag. The sound is dull. Anticlimactic, no cinematic relief, sudden flood of freedom. What I feel instead is space.Room, breathing room.
At the back of the cabinet, shoved behind cleaning supplies, I find one more test.Loose. No box. No instructions, just forgotten.My stomach tightens.You don’t have to,I tell myself. But my body has been… different. Not dramatically, just enough to notice if I’m paying attention without spiraling.
A heaviness low in my belly that doesn’t feel like dread, tiredness that’s bone-deep, not grief-deep, a tenderness I kept brushing off as stress. I stare at the test in my hand.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Once. And whatever it says, we breathe.” I take the test.
After I sit on the edge of the tub and focus on my breathing and I think about therapy, Dr. Meyers asking who I am without motherhood attached to my identity, Angel admitting he grieved futures he never spoke out loud.
The timer beeps. At first, I think I’m imagining it. A whisper of color, faint it might be nothing, so light it could disappear if I blink wrong. I lean closer and there it is. My hands start to shake.
“No,” I breathe. “Don’t do this. Not like this.”
Hope tries to surge. I press it down gently. I set the test on the counter and sit back against the tub. My heart is pounding. But it isn’t frantic.It’s… careful.
I place my palm over my stomach, not to claim, not to demand. Just to acknowledge.
“Hi,” I whisper. “I don’t know what you are yet.” Tears come. But they’re soft.
When Angel gets home, I’m waiting in the living room. The door opens; he steps inside and freezes like he’s afraid to spook me. Like I might vanish if he moves too fast.
“Hey,” he says carefully.
“Hey.”
He searches my face. Looking for cracks, storm clouds, or warning signs. Instead, I step forward and wrap my arms around him. He exhales hard into my hair like he’s been holding that breath for weeks.
“I missed you,” he murmurs.
“I know.” We stay like that for a long time.
Later, we sit on the couch. Knees touching, our fingers loosely intertwined. There’s a softness between us now. The kind that only comes after you’ve both broken and chosen to stay anyway.
