Chapter 2 I Can't Tell Him

WREN Pov

I didn't cry until I was three blocks from the house.

I pulled over on a side street I didn't recognize until I did, one of those streets you drive past a hundred times without seeing, and I sat there with both hands on the wheel and let it out the way I hadn't let myself in front of him. Not for Bradley. Not really. I cried because I had done all of that - the folder, the pen, her hand on her stomach - with a clear head and a steady voice, and some part of me had wanted, stupidly, to be given credit for surviving it twice.

Nobody gives you credit for surviving something nobody else remembers happening once.

I called my grandmother before I let myself think better of it.

She answered on the second ring, the way she always did, like she kept the phone in her apron pocket out of habit rather than expectation. "Wren?"

"Can I come over?"

"You're already crying," she said. It wasn't a question. "Come."

My grandmother's house still smelled like cardamom and the lemon oil she used on the furniture, and some animal part of my chest unclenched the second I stepped through her door, the way it always had, the way it hadn't in three months of a life I wasn't supposed to get back. She took one look at my face and didn't ask about Bradley first. She put the kettle on. She sat me down at the same table I'd done my homework at as a girl, and she waited, because she had never once in my life needed to fill silence with noise.

"He gave me the papers," I said. "I signed them."

"Good," she said, which surprised a laugh out of me even with my eyes still wet. "You didn't fight him on it."

"Would it have mattered?"

"No," she said. "But I raised you to know the difference between a fight worth losing and one worth walking away from. Sounds like you already knew it too."

I wrapped both hands around the mug she set in front of me and looked at the tea instead of her face, because what I had to say next required a kind of courage I hadn't needed for the divorce at all.

"I'm pregnant," I said.

The silence that followed was different from her usual silences. She set her own cup down slowly, like the table might not hold both its weight and this news at the same time.

"Does he know?"

"No. And he can't. Not yet. Not until I understand what I'm doing."

"Wren." My name in her mouth had a warning in it now. "A man doesn't get to walk away from you the same week he finds out he's going to be a father. That's not a secret you get to keep just because you're angry."

"It's not anger." I made myself look up at her. "Grandma, I need you to listen to something, and I need you to not decide I've lost my mind before I finish."

She didn't promise me that. She was too honest for that. But she folded her hands on the table and waited, and I told her.

I told her about the hospital hallway, the smell of it, the sound of my own voice going raw. I told her about the door nobody opened. I told her that I had died - actually died, not fainted, not dreamed - pregnant and alone in a version of this year that hadn't happened yet, and that I had woken up this morning three months earlier with every hour of it sitting in my head like something I'd lived instead of something I'd imagined.

I told her about the outbreak. The disease that didn't just kill people but unmade them first, turned people you loved into something that used to wear their face. I told her it started small, the way disasters always start small enough for everyone to ignore, and that it would come from Bradley's family's lab, from money I had helped funnel toward a research division I hadn't understood I was arming.

I told her it would happen on Bradley's thirtieth birthday.

When I finished, she didn't say anything for a long moment. Her face had gone carefully blank in the way I recognized from childhood, the face she used when she was deciding how gently to tell me something I didn't want to hear.

"You've had a terrible shock," she finally said. "The divorce. The pregnancy. It would break anyone's mind a little, having to carry both of those alone."

"I knew you'd say that."

"Because it's true, sweetheart. Grief does strange things. It doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel it, but it doesn't mean the things you're seeing are real."

I didn't argue with her. I had expected this, had lived enough of my life to know that no one believes a thing like this the first time it's said out loud, no matter how much they love you. I only asked her not to repeat it to anyone, and she agreed to that much at least, because whatever she believed about the vision, she believed completely in keeping my secrets safe.

"You'll stay for dinner," she said, in the tone that meant it wasn't a request, and she got up to check on something in the oven, and for a moment the kitchen felt like it belonged to a life uncomplicated by anything I remembered.

But she wasn't finished with me. She never let a hard thing sit for long without circling back to the part she actually wanted to say.

"Whatever you believe you saw," she said, her back still to me at the stove, "that baby is real. And a baby needs a father who knows he's a father, Wren, whatever else is true or isn't."

"I can't tell him. Not yet."

"Why not?"

I didn't have an answer I could give her, not the real one, not the one that involved a man whose name I hadn't said out loud to another living soul and didn't intend to. So I gave her half of it, which was still true.

"Because the moment I tell him, it stops being something I control," I said. "And I need it to stay mine a little longer."

She turned from the stove then, and there was nothing soft left in her face, only the particular steadiness she used when she meant every word twice as hard as it sounded. "You don't get forever, sweetheart. Whatever you're protecting yourself from by staying quiet, it has a clock on it whether you like the sound of it ticking or not. You know that better than anyone, don't you? Seeing what you think you've seen."

I opened my mouth to tell her she didn't understand, that the clock she meant and the clock I meant weren't the same clock at all, and that mine was worse.

"I need you to promise me something," she said instead, before I could get a word out. "Promise me you won't let this go three more months without a decision. Not three more days, if you can help it."

I didn't answer her right away. I sat there with my hands around a cup gone cold, and I understood, for the first time since I'd woken up that morning, that surviving this life the second time was not going to be a matter of simply remembering what came next.

It was going to be a matter of deciding, over and over, what I was willing to let myself become in order to keep it.

"I promise," I said.

I did not tell her that I already knew exactly how little a promise like that was worth against a clock she couldn't see.