Page 60 of Say You'll Stay
Tears well anew, but this time, they’re tinged with something like hope. A fragile, flickering thing, but present nonetheless.
“I hear you,” I whisper, my voice a ragged wisp. “I don’t…I don’t know how, but I hear you.”
Sonya nods, a small, sad smile playing at the corners of her lips. “One day at a time, sweet pea. One hour, one minute if that’s what it takes. We’ll be here, every step of the way.”
I sag against her, suddenly exhausted. The events of the past few days crash over me like a tsunami, leaving me flayed open and drowning.
Sonya, attuned to my every shift as always, rises to her feet, pulling me up with her. “C’mon, let’s get you to bed. Everything else can wait until morning.”
I let her lead me to the bedroom, too drained to protest. She tucks me in like she did when we were kids, smoothing the covers with a tender hand.
As she turns to leave, a sudden, irrational surge of panic seizes me. My hand shoots out, grasping her wrist with clumsy desperation.
“Stay,” I plead, not caring how pathetic I sound. “Please, Sonya. I can’t…I don’t want to be alone.”
Her expression softens, an aching tenderness smoothing the worried lines of her face. “Of course, Cici. Scoot over.”
She climbs into bed beside me, curling around my back like a protective parenthesis. The steady thrum of her heartbeat against my spine is a lullaby, a tether to reality in the churning tempest of my mind.
Exhaustion drags at me, a bone-deep weariness that no amount of sleep can touch. As I hover on the precipice of unconsciousness, lulled by my sister’s even breathing, a sudden memory lances through me.
The nausea. The dizziness. The way my body has felt like a foreign thing, betraying me in subtle, inexplicable ways.
No.
The thought is a whiplash, a bucket of ice water dumped over my head. Surely the universe isn’t that cruel, that capriciously vicious. There has to be another explanation, another reason for the insistent curl of dread in my gut.
But even as I scramble for alternative explanations, the truth sinks in with sickening certainty. A hysterical laugh bubbles up my throat, escaping in a strangled little gasp.
Pregnant. I’m fucking pregnant.
Sonya stirs against my back, an inquisitive hum vibrating through my skin. “Car? What’s wrong?”
For a moment, I consider laughing it off, shoving the horrible revelation into the shadows of my mind. But I can’t carry this alone, this anvil-weight of terrible knowledge.
Slowly, I twist in her arms until we’re face to face. In the gloom of the bedroom, her eyes are depthless pools, filled with a concern so raw it steals my breath.
“I think I’m pregnant,” I whisper, the words like nails in my mouth. “I think…God, Sonya. I’m pregnant with June’s baby.”
The breath rushes from her lungs in a sharp exhale, a punch of surprise. She’s silent for a long, terrible moment, the gears of her mind visibly turning behind her eyes.
When she finally speaks, her voice is a careful, studied neutral. “Okay,” she says slowly, evenly. “Okay. Have you taken a test?”
I shake my head, mute. The thought of peeing on a stick, of seeing my fate confirmed in stark pink and white, makes my gorge rise.
Sonya nods, as if I’ve given her an answer anyway. “Right. Okay. That’s step one, then. We’ll get a test tomorrow, and we’ll go from there.”
“Go where, Sonya?” My voice cracks, splinters. “Where can I possibly go from here? I’m carrying the child of the man who violated my trust, who ripped my heart to shreds. What am I supposed to do?”
Tears carve hot, bitter trails down my face. I feel unmoored, cast adrift in a storm-tossed sea with no land in sight.
Sonya pulls me close, tucking my head beneath her chin. I burrow into her warmth, desperate for any scrap of comfort, any fleeting sense of safety.
“I know it feels impossible right now,” she murmurs, her voice a soothing hum against the shell of my ear. “I know you’re scared, and angry, and hurting in ways I can’t even begin to imagine. But Cara, you’re not alone in this. No matter what happens, no matter what you decide…I’m here. We’re all here. You don’t have to face this by yourself.”
A sob hitches in my throat, gratitude and despair warring in my chest. “I don’t know what to do, Sonny. I don’t know how to be a mother, how to raise a child alone. And June…”
The name is a blade between my ribs, a piercing ache that steals my breath. Sonya rubs soothing circles on my back, a steady comfort in the whirlwind of my thoughts.