Page 134 of Breaking
I looked at the test in my hand. I looked at her face. She looked at the floor.
I didn't say his name.
I didn't have to say his name.
"Audrey."
"Astrid."
"How long have you known?"
"An hour."
"An hour."
"I took it in the staff bathroom at the end of the shift. I took two more. They're all the same."
"Audrey."
"I haven't told him."
"Audrey."
"I haven't told anyone, Astrid. I drove here from the parking lot."
I set the test down on the side table by the door. I put my arms back around her. She let me. She put her forehead on my shoulder, the way I had put my forehead on her shoulder on a kitchen counter in December, the way I had put my forehead onher shoulder a hundred times in the twenty-two years she had been my best friend, and not once, in those twenty-two years, had she put her forehead on mine.
She cried.
Moose pressed his shoulder against the back of her knee. The sun came up the rest of the way over the trees at the back of the yard.
I held my best friend in the doorway of the house I hadn't known I had been waiting for.
"It's okay," I said.
"Astrid."
"It's okay, Audrey. We're going to figure it out."
"You don't know that."
"I do."
She drew a breath against my shoulder.
I held on.
To be continued inLoving.
