Page 40 of Babies for the Boss
“I’ve been better.”
“I imagine you have.” A brief pause. “And the funding—Pavel, you truly don’t need to continue at the level you?—”
“Start new programs if the existing ones are covered.”
“I already have. Three in the last two years. A literacy program for adults, an after-school kitchen for children in the parish, and transitional housing for women who are rebuilding after difficult circumstances.” She pauses. “Real good is being done. Consistent, daily good. People’s lives are different because of it. Because of you.”
Her kind words don’t staunch the wound in my chest. But it’s nice to know, all the same.
We say goodbye, and I set the phone down. This is the worst part, and I knew it would be. The silence of a decision that is made and waiting to be executed. It’s always the hardest interval in any operation.
Not the deciding. The waiting.
I’m going to send Molly away. To keep her safe. That is all that matters. My feelings on the subject are irrelevant.
Everything else—the office without her in it, the air in a room she has just left, the loss of the only thing in twenty years that has made me feel like a man rather than a mechanism—is the cost, and I have always paid my costs without complaint. But I have never paid one that felt like this, and that is why Fedor knows he can use her. He knows what truly losing her would cost me.
I’m still working out how he knows this when she walks back in from lunch.
Something is wrong. She’s pale in a way that comes from within rather than from the cold. As she moves across the office, she does so with the careful deliberateness of someone holding something fragile, most likely themselves.
Vet should have told me already. Where is she?
I’m beside her before I have made a conscious decision to move, which is becoming a pattern with her. “My office.”
She looks up at me, surprised. As though she did not see me move toward her. Something moves across her face that I cannot read cleanly, which is unusual. She picks up her bag and follows me in without comment.
Where is her talkative yammering I have come to depend on/delight in?
I close the door behind us and look at her in the pale afternoon light. She looks wan and tired, like she’s been worn through by something big.
I have seen Underslept Molly, Undercaffeinated Molly, and Stomach Bug Molly. This is none of them.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her thoughts weigh heavier than what she’s willing to announce—her eyes shift slightly side to side as she considers her next words. As if she had to rehearse them.
“Molly, are you ill? If you’re contagious, you should go home.”
“I’m not contagious.”
“Well, whatever it is, you can tell me any?—”
“I’m pregnant.”
For a long time, I had wondered what would happen were a companion to tell me such a thing. Would all the sound bleed out of my hearing, as the times I had a concussion? Would my heart stop? Would the world cease spinning?
To my surprise, it’s none of these. It’s not even shock. Shock is a disruption, a thing that knocks you sideways into disorientation.
This is the opposite, as if my senses sharpen in a flash. I can see the fine lines around Molly’s eyes from across the room. The sound of voices in the room next to us. Her perfume carries to me, no matter how subtle it normally is.
And I feel everything. The weight of my clothes. The air-conditioning on my skin. The firmness of my chair beneath me.
I’m aware of everything rearranging itself into a new order. The most startling part of all is that it feels, against logic, as though it has always been the correct order.
I simply could not see it until this moment because I was standing in the wrong place.
Molly is carrying my child. This is how it was always supposed to be.
She’s standing in my office, pale and frightened and carrying my child, and every arrangement I have made since calling in Vet, every protocol and contingency, every sleepless calculation, including the call I made this morning to a nun in Chicago, reconfigures itself instantly and completely around this single fact.
