Chapter 324: Chapter 326: It Is Positive
ARIA’S POV
She’d been tired for two weeks.
Not the good tired. Not the tired that came from working hard and sleeping well and living a full life. The other kind. The kind that sat behind her eyes and followed her from room to room and didn’t shift no matter how much sleep she got.
She’d put it down to the Foundation launch. The honeymoon adjustment. Coming back to full hospital schedule after seven days of doing nothing. Any of those things. All of them.
She hadn’t thought too hard about it.
She was a doctor. She knew how to compartmentalise symptoms. She was very good at it when the symptoms were her own.
Mei came for lunch on a Tuesday.
Mrs Chen made soup.
The three of them at the kitchen table Mei, Aria, and Mrs Chen who sat down because Mei had invited her to which was very Mei and which Mrs Chen had accepted without ceremony which was very Mrs Abel.
Aria looked at the soup.
She wasn’t hungry.
She’d woken up not hungry. Had managed half a piece of toast and called it breakfast and moved on. Now it was noon and the soup smelled like something she couldn’t name and her stomach was doing something she was choosing not to examine.
She picked up her spoon.
She put it down.
Mei was talking to Mrs Chen about something. The garden. Alexander’s visit at the weekend. Something Richard had apparently said at dinner last week that Mrs Chen found either hilarious or outrageous Aria couldn’t tell which from her expression.
She picked up her spoon again.
The smell hit her.
She set the spoon down carefully and looked at the table and breathed through her nose slowly and told herself it was fine and that nothing was happening and she was absolutely not about to embarrass herself at her own kitchen table.
The feeling passed.
She exhaled.
She looked up.
Mei was watching her.
Not talking to Mrs Abel anymore. Not doing anything. Just sitting across the table with her soup untouched and her hands in her lap and her eyes on Aria’s face with an expression Aria knew.
She’d seen it her whole life.
The knowing expression.
The one that meant Mei Chen had already arrived at a conclusion and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"Mum," Aria said.
"Mm," Mei said.
"Stop looking at me like that."
"Like what."
"Like that." Aria gestured vaguely at her face. "Like you know something."
"I’m just having lunch," Mei said.
Mrs Chen looked between them and stood up and took her soup to the counter without a word. Twenty years of working in a household had given her excellent instincts about when to be elsewhere.
Aria looked at her mother.
Mei looked at her soup.
"When did the tiredness start," Mei said.
"I’m not..."
"Aria."
"It’s just the adjustment from the honeymoon. Coming back to full schedule..."
"When did it start," Mei said again. Same voice. The one that had been ending Aria’s arguments since she was four years old.
Aria looked at the table.
She thought about it honestly.
"Two weeks ago," she said. "Maybe three."
"Are you eating."
"Yes."
"You haven’t touched your soup."
"I’m not hungry right now."
"You weren’t hungry this morning either," Mei said. "Mrs Chen told me."
Aria looked up. "Mrs Chen is reporting to you now."
"Mrs Abel was concerned." Mei picked up her own spoon. "She said you’ve barely eaten in a week."
"That’s an exaggeration."
"Is it."
It wasn’t entirely.
She’d been managing half portions of everything and calling it fine and not examining it too closely because she had a Foundation to run and a hospital schedule and a life that required her full attention and she didn’t have time to be unwell.
She looked at her mother’s face.
Mei was looking at her soup.
"Say it," Aria said.
"Say what."
"Whatever you’re not saying."
Mei was quiet for a moment.
She set her spoon down.
She looked at her daughter across the kitchen table with the expression of a woman who had known this before the evidence had fully assembled itself because she was Mei and she had always known things about Aria before Aria knew them herself.
"When was your last period," she said.
The kitchen was very quiet.
Aria opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Thought about it.
Actually thought about it....not the dismissive not now I’m busy version of thinking about it, but actually going back through the last weeks and the honeymoon and the month before that and trying to find the answer to a question she realised with a specific cold clarity she did not currently have an answer to.
She couldn’t find it.
"Aria," Mei said.
"I’m thinking," Aria said.
"You’re a doctor," Mei said. "You know what this is."
"I don’t — I haven’t — it could be stress. Post-honeymoon adjustment. Coming back to full schedule can affect..."
"Aria."
She stopped talking.
She looked at her mother.
Mei looked back at her with the complete patience of a woman who had already arrived and was waiting at the destination.
"Go," Mei said quietly. "Go find out."
She drove to the pharmacy three streets away.
Not the one near the hospital. Not the one Marcus used for estate supplies. The anonymous one three streets away where nobody knew her.
She bought two tests.
She sat in the car in the parking lot for four minutes doing nothing.
Then she drove home.
The bathroom off the master bedroom.
She locked the door.
She looked at the box in her hands.
She was a doctor. She knew exactly how these worked. She’d explained them to patients. She’d discussed results with women in exactly this position on both sides of the outcome. She was clinical and competent and completely calm about reproductive medicine in a professional context.
Her hands were shaking.
She did the test.
She set it on the counter face down.
She looked at the wall.
Three minutes.
She was a doctor. She knew that three minutes was nothing. Three minutes was the time it took to wash her hands and dry them and fold the towel back exactly as it had been. Three minutes was the time it took to look at the ring on her finger and think about a garden bench and a Saturday morning and yes said without hesitation.
Three minutes was the longest she’d ever waited for anything.
She turned the test over.
She sat on the edge of the bath for a long time.
Just sat.
The test on the counter in front of her. The result clear and unambiguous and requiring no medical training to interpret.
Positive.
She looked at it.
She thought about the Maldives. The last night. The small strange pull she’d felt and put away. The tiredness she’d been managing for two weeks. The soup she couldn’t eat today.
She thought about a plant in a greenhouse and a mother who had nearly died and the chain of everything that had led from that to this bathroom to this test to this result.
She thought about Damien.
His face when she told him.
She didn’t know what it would look like.
She thought she did. She thought she knew this man completely...his face, his voice, his specific language of controlled emotion and what lived underneath it. She’d been learning him for a year and she thought she knew.
But this.
She picked up the test.
She looked at it one more time.
Positive.
She put it down.
She stood up.
She unlocked the bathroom door.
She walked out into the bedroom and stood at the window and looked at the east garden.... the bench, the arch still visible at the far end, the peonies long gone now but the memory of them present, and felt something that was too large and too warm and too complicated to name all at once.
She didn’t try to name it all at once.
She just let it exist.
Her phone was on the bedside table.
She picked it up.
She looked at Damien’s name.
She put it down.
Not like this. Not a phone call. Not a text.
Face to face.
Tonight.
She went downstairs.
Mei was still at the kitchen table.
Mrs Abel had tactfully disappeared entirely.
Mei looked up when Aria came back in.
She looked at Aria’s face.
She said nothing.
Aria sat down across from her.
They looked at each other.
"Well," Aria said.
Mei’s eyes went very bright.
"Well," she said.
Aria looked at the table.
"I don’t know how he’s going to..."
"I do," Mei said.
"You don’t..."
"I do," Mei said again. Certain. Complete. "I know exactly how he’s going to react."
Aria looked at her mother.
"How," she said.
Mei smiled.
The full one. The real one. The one that had been Aria’s whole world for twenty four years.
"The same way he reacts to everything you do," she said. "Like you’re the only thing in the room."
Aria looked at her hands.
The ring on her finger.
The test upstairs on the bathroom counter.
The east garden through the window.
She thought about tonight.
She thought about his face.
She thought about forever and what it was becoming.
"Okay," she said quietly.
Just that.
Okay.
Mei reached across the table and covered her hand.
They sat in the kitchen and the afternoon continued outside and everything was about to change and for right now it was just the two of them at a table the way it had always been.
The way it would always be.
