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FORTY-SEVEN

“WELL, YOU’RE IN GOOD health, no question. You’re doing everything right. You’re taking the prenatal vitamins. Your diet is the right one, and you’re exercising just the appropriate amount. But we know it’s still very early.” Dr. Morales, a middle-aged woman herself, looks over her glasses at Camille. “So we keep our expectations at an even keel, right?”

“Right. Sure.” Camille hears herself saying the words but isn’t sure she believes them. At age forty, she didn’t think she’d ever have a child. She wasn’t planning to have one, either. But ever since she got the news from the at-home test, waiting those agonizing five minutes and then finding two pink lines, not one, on the tiny face of the tester — ever since then, the idea of being a mother has slowly grown and taken shape, just like the child itself, to the point where she can’t imagine being anything but a mother now.

But she knows the risks at her age. And she isn’t quite at three months, even. It is way too early for her to have her hopes this high. The good doctor is right.

“Do you have help?” Dr. Morales asks. “Is the father in the picture?”

Camille lets out a small laugh. “How much time do you have?”

“None of my business. Just wondering in terms of help —”

“I would say he’s in the picture.” Camille rocks her head from side to side. “How much in the picture is the real question.”

“Okay. Got it.”

“He’s married. Not to me.”

Camille catches herself. Why did she just say that? Why would she volunteer that information to someone who, if not a complete stranger, certainly isn’t a close friend?

Probably because she isn’t a close friend. And she’s sworn to secrecy.

Or maybe pregnancy does something to your social filters. Her moods lately. Though she’s kind of enjoyed losing the filters.

“I see. Well.” The doctor puts down her laptop. “I’d just like you to have a support network — that’s the only reason I ask.”

“I’m good.” She’s not sure why she said that, either. Good is probably not the right word. Scared, uncertain, shaky — all those words fit better.

She makes her next appointment at the front desk. “Congratulations!” the receptionist says to her, a little more loudly and enthusiastically than Camille would have liked. Why don’t you announce it to the whole waiting room?

The waiting room itself holds only two people — one a young woman, white, with a long brown ponytail, who is reading a book. The other, a Black woman who is visibly pregnant, her young boy sitting next to her watching some kind of electronic screen. Nobody seems to be paying much attention to Camille.

She returns to her car in the parking garage and heads back toward Hemingway Grove. David set her up with a doctor in HG, but she’d prefer Dr. Morales, who’s been her ob-gyn for more than a decade.

She planned the appointment for noon in Chicago so she could avoid rush-hour traffic returning to Hemingway Grove. She travels the ninety miles in less than two hours, mostly highway travel, finally exiting onto the ramp for HG, passing Hemingway’s Pub along the way, with its shiny sign and neat landscaping. She turns into the ground-level parking lot in her apartment building.

Waiting there, leaning against a police cruiser, is Sergeant Kyle Janowski.

She gets out of her Jeep and looks at him with raised eyebrows. “Officer Janowski.” Using the inferior rank again. “What a nice surprise.”

“Afternoon, Ms. Striker,” he says. “How was your doctor’s appointment?”