Page 49 of The Pucking Date
I’veknown.
The last few weeks have been a blur of travel, deadlines, and dodging my own thoughts, but in the quiet of the driver’s seat, the truth presses in, relentless. A weight I can’t avoid anymore.
My hands shake as I peel off the parking ticket.
I don’t drive home.
Ifloat.
And when I finally get there, Bloomingdale’s bags abandoned on the floor, I head straight for the bathroom. Straight for the drawer where I tucked the box away, half daring myself to forget it.
I don’t need to read the instructions. I’ve imagined this moment in nightmares and daydreams for years. Three minutes that feel like three hours. And when the results appear, stark and undeniable, I sit on the edge of the tub, heart hammering against my ribs, air completely gone from my lungs.
Staring at the test, I will it to change, hoping if I blink long enough, the lines might fade like a cruel mirage. They don’t. They just stare back, unwavering as a verdict.
Pregnant.
I don’t cry.
I don’t scream.
I gostill.
A thousand thoughts slam into me at once: Finn and what this means for us, Park City and whether I can fake myway through a summit while my world implodes, the team and my father, and how a pregnancy will derail every carefully laid plan I’ve ever made. How do I build an empire when I can barely manage my own life?
But only one word makes it to the surface.
Sophie.
I grab my phone with hands that barely work. My fingers swipe wrong three times before I get to her name.
Jessica: Come to my house.
Her reply is instant.
Sophie: What? I just saw you like an hour ago.
Jess: Please. Just…come.
There’s a pause.
Then:
Sophie: On my way.
I sit there in the growing darkness, wrapped in silence and the weight of two pink lines that just rewrote my entire future. Waiting for my sister to walk through the door and help me figure out how to tell the father of my baby that our one night of recklessness just became a lifetime of consequences.
11
SHIT YOU CAN’T UN-PEE ON
JESSICA
Sophie arrives in record time, letting herself in with the spare key and stepping inside like she’s expecting to find a crime scene. Which, given my frantic text, isn’t entirely unreasonable.
“Okay, I’m here. Who died?” she asks, kicking off her heels. “And if you say you ran out of dry shampoo again, I swear to God?—”
Seeing me hold up the test without preamble, Sophie stops cold, her eyebrows climbing toward her hairline as understanding dawns.
