Emily's POV
I had been staring at the ceiling for three days.
Not literally. I got up. I went to work. I refilled coffee and smiled at strangers and came home and made dinner and helped Lily with her reading and tucked my mother in and then lay down and stared at the ceiling until my eyes burned.
Three days of trying to figure out how to tell a man who had blocked my number that I was carrying his child.
There was no good version of this. I had turned it over every possible way, the way you turn a problem looking for a seam, a place where it opens, and there was no seam. There was just the fact of it, sitting in the middle of everything like something that had always been there, waiting for me to stop pretending it wasn't.
I thought about going to New York. Imagined myself walking into the Bricks and Brains headquarters. Asking to see Victor. Waiting in the lobby while someone went upstairs to tell him his inconvenient ex-wife was in the building.
