Page 141 of Auctioned to the Mafia Don
I escape before she can build a defense.
My bedroom door clicks shut behind me.
For a long time, I stand in the center of the room without moving. The apartment is quiet here, softened by the muffled sound of the twins arguing in the kitchen and Alex telling them both to lower their voices. On the dresser sits a framed photograph Erin made us take last week. The three of us are on the couch, Heath trying not to smile while Erin leans on my side hard enough to push me sideways.
I look at it.
Then at the paper bag.
Then back at the photograph.
This is not how I imagined my life.
That thought is useless. My life has never cared what I imagined.
I take the test into the bathroom and lock the door.
The instructions are printed in three languages. I read them twice, then a third time because my hands are shaking too badly to trust my eyes. The process takes less than a minute. Waiting takes forever.
I sit on the closed toilet lid with the test balanced on the counter and count the tiles on the floor.
One. Two. Three. Four.
By the time I reach twenty, my breath has gone thin.
I look up.
Two lines.
For a moment, I do not understand what I am seeing.
The second line is pale, but it is there. Clear enough that my body knows before my mind catches up. The room seems to tilt. I clutch the edge of the counter, waiting for panic to arrive, because I do not know how to do this alone and I do not know what this means for the children, for Stefano, or for the life I have been trying to hold together.
First comes a memory of Alice.
Not the end. Not Leon. Not the photographs I have tried to forget.
Alice at twenty-two, standing barefoot in our mother’s kitchen with a pregnancy test in her hand and tears running down her face because she was scared and happy and already trying to convince everyone else that she could handle it. She had laughed when I jokingly told her she was going to be a terrible mother.
“I’ll be better than you,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know everything.”
She had believed it.
For a second, I have to press both hands over my mouth to keep the sound inside.
I am not Alice.
I am not going to become her.
The words feel cruel the moment I think them, as though loving her means inheriting each and every fear she died with. Still fear does not become fate because I refuse to name it, and I need to believe that if I am going to carry this child and keep my children safe.
I pick up the test again.
Two lines.
