Page 80 of Knocked Up

"You don't know that."

"I called her from the parking garage," I said.

Tessa lifted her head off my chest and looked at me for a second. Then she made a sound that was half a laugh and definitely half something else. She got in the truck.

We sat there with the engine running and the heater on because she was shaking. It was not the cold.

"Say it again," she said.

"I'm staying."

"Say the whole thing."

"They didn't move me. The window's closed. I'm here till at least July." I had both hands on the wheel of my own truck, which I had not turned off. "That's all it is, Tessa. It's five months. It isn't a…"

"Don't." She had her head back against the rest. "Don't do the part where you make it smaller so I don't have to have a feeling about it."

"Okay."

"Do you know what I did at one o'clock?"

"No."

"I was in a room with a nine-year-old lab and a family, and the wife was crying. I did the whole conversation properly, all of it. I was good. The entire time there was a part of my head standing in a parking lot doing this." She held up her phone. "And I've never done that in my life. Not when the equipment people called. Not when my mother… I don't do that."

"I know."

"So don't tell me it's five months."

"Okay," I said.

She turned her head on the rest and looked at me. "Come here."

I went there.

She has one hand she uses on the side of my face and I know it now. The heater was going and the windows were doing what windows do. It went on until a woman with two dogs came past the fence and looked directly into my truck. Tessa put her face into my shoulder and laughed for about a minute.

"That's Denise Petrocelli," she said, into my jacket. "She has a schnauzer. She does the block newsletter."

"Let her do the newsletter," I said.

And then Tessa Reeves sat back in the passenger seat with the heater roaring. She put both her hands flat on her own stomach and said, to the windshield, "The 26th of June." Her voice was completely different, like a woman reading a date off a wall and finding out it was a place she was allowed to go.

Chapter 22: Tessa

The rescan was at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday in April and I had been awake since three.

Beckett drove with the radio off, which he does. At the light on Wadsworth he said, "What's the number if it's moved?" I said, "There isn't a number. It's moved or it isn't." That was the entire conversation in the car.

The room was dim. There was a machine on a cart and a screen turned toward the bed. There was a woman named Charlotte who did the scans in a voice like a person reading out a train timetable. I had come to love her for it.

She was quiet a long time.

"Okay," Charlotte said. "So that's up and out of the way. You've got a good clear margin. That's a completely different picture than December."

"Say the distance."

She gave me the distance. It was a good one. I lay there and put both hands over my face.