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I sit back down on the toilet lid. I hold the test in both hands like it might do something else if I stop watching it. I wait for the room to feel different. It does. The whole bathroom recalibrating around one small plastic object with two pink lines on it. Everything in my life is reorganizing itself around a fact that didn’t exist forty minutes ago and now organizes everything.

I don’t think about myself first. That’s the part I notice, distantly, from somewhere outside my own body. My first full thought isn’t about my life. Not my plans, my law school timeline, my Nationals — any of the things that would be reasonable to think about first.

My first full thought is Theo.

The draft. The Bruins. Pete Kowalski’s voice on that call, laying out a plan built around a version of his senior year with no room in it for a baby. The Tab he’s spent years paying down dollar by dollar, and how a baby doesn’t reduce debt, it multiplies every kind of pressure he’s already carrying. The specific fragile thing he’s built out of almost nothing. No father worth the name. A mother who worked doubles in scrubs to keep the lights on. A scholarship, a spreadsheet, sheer force of will. And I might be the variable that knocks the whole structure sideways at the exact moment it was finally, finally about to pay off.

He deserves this season. He deserves the draft exactly the way he’s planned it. He deserves to walk into whatever comes next without carrying something this size on top of everything else he’s already carrying.

And I might have just made sure he can’t.

I don’t cry, not yet. I just sit there on the closed lid of a toilet in a bathroom that smells like my own shampoo, holding a piece of plastic that has rearranged my entire future, thinking almost entirely about his.

Nationals is five weeks out. Conference Finals is in two days. The season Theo’s spent three years building toward is about to hit its highest point. Somewhere underneath all of it is a scout who’s already decided he’s worth a second-round pick. An organization that’s already built a plan around him finishing exactly where he is.

I make the decision the way I make every decision that matters — carefully, with contingencies, telling myself a story that makes it sound like strategy instead of what it actually is, which is fear wearing strategy’s clothes.

I’ll wait.

Not forever. Just until Nationals is over. Just until Conference Finals and the run toward the Frozen Four don’t have this sitting underneath them like a landmine waiting to go off at the worst possible moment. I can hold this. I’ve held bigger things alone before. The eating disorder. Maddison and Michael and every quiet family wound I’ve carried without ever once making anyone else carry it with me.

I can hold this too. A few more weeks. That’s all I’m asking of myself.

I run through the logic one more time, the way I’d run through a closing argument — testing it for weaknesses, looking for the place a good opposing counsel would tear it apart. You’re protecting him. That’s the argument. That’s what I tell myself, sitting on the bathroom floor with the test wrapped in tissue in my hand. He’s three weeks from the biggest stretch of his career, and I’m not going to be the reason he walks into Conference Finals distracted, or the reason a scout watching him for the Bruins sees something other than the player they’ve already decided to build a future around.

I know, somewhere underneath the argument, that there’s another word for this. That protecting someone and hiding something from them aren’t always as different as I’m currently pretending they are. I know Theo would tell me that himself, if he knew what I was doing right now — he built an entire ethics project around exactly this distinction, the secret-keeper who tells herself it’s care instead of fear. I gave the defense in that seminar room myself, out loud, three weeks ago. You can’t argue someone was wrong for being scared. You can only argue about what they do when the fear runs out.

My fear hasn’t run out yet. I tell myself that’s different from cowardice. I’m not entirely sure I believe it.

I wrap the test in toilet paper and tuck it into the bottom of the bathroom trash, under everything else, the way you bury something you’re not ready to look at again but aren’t ready to fully release either. I wash my hands. I look at myself in the mirror — pale, a little hollow around the eyes, but composed, because composed is the one thing I know how to be no matter what’s underneath it.

I fix my face. I unlock the door. I go back out into a house that doesn’t know anything has changed. Into a life that’s about to keep moving whether I’ve caught up to it or not. I do the thing I’ve been doing since I was eight years old.

I hold it together.

Nobody has to know yet. Not Theo. Not Sloane. Not anyone.

I just have to make it to April.

Chapter 24

Theo

The text comes in at nine in the morning, game day, before I’m even fully awake.

Dad

Wanted you to know I’ll be there tonight. Wasn’t going to surprise you.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, lying in the dark of my room with the phone lighting up my face. I feel the specific violence of it settle into my chest before I’ve even fully processed the words. Not an invitation. Not a question. A fait accompli dressed up as courtesy — wasn’t going to surprise you, like the courtesy is the point, like telling me instead of just showing up unannounced makes this something other than exactly what it is.

He’s coming whether I want him there or not. He’s just letting me know in advance so I can’t call it an ambush.

This is the pattern of my whole life with this man, distilled down to two sentences and a nine a.m. text. He doesn’t ask. He decides, and then he frames the deciding as generosity — the checkbook he showed up with when I was seventeen, the photos of Noah and Logan he sends without being asked, the equipment for my birthday that turned into another line on the Tab. Everything with my dad arrives already finished, already decided, and the only choice he leaves me is how to receive it.

I don’t reply. I set the phone face-down on the nightstand. I lie there for another minute, staring at the ceiling, doing the thing I do with everything this size. Folding it down. Small enough to carry. Small enough to not let it touch the rest of the day. Game day has a routine. The routine doesn’t have room for this. I get up. I get moving. I don’t tell anyone yet.

I text Margo around eleven, same as I always do before a big game.