Becoming Grey: Episode 11

Chapter Eleven 

November 8th,  2017 

Callie and Myles had kept their promise to slow things down, and for the most part their relationship had settled into something comfortably ordinary. They were still together. They still kissed whenever they managed to find five minutes without Luke wandering into the room or Maggie developing some suspiciously urgent reason to be wherever Callie happened to be. Myles still found increasingly ridiculous excuses to stop by Grey’s General Store, sometimes buying nothing more than a bottle of Coke, a pack of gum, or a candy bar he claimed he had been thinking about all afternoon, as though Ridgemont contained no other stores. Maggie, naturally, had developed increasingly elaborate ways of pointing this out. Callie pretended the commentary bothered her more than it did. The truth was that she liked seeing Myles come through the automatic doors. She liked seeing his name on her phone most mornings before school and again before bed, liked that he sat with them at lunch now, and liked that she had spent enough time at Games Galore for his parents to stop asking whether she needed help finding anything. 

For several weeks, Callie had been perfectly happy with the arrangement. Nothing about her life had suddenly become perfect. Chemistry homework still existed. Grey’s continued stealing Saturdays from her. Hannah remained incapable of understanding that a closed bedroom door might serve any purpose beyond giving her something to open. Callie’s automatic enclosure project had developed a sensor problem almost immediately after she solved the issue with the servo. None of that mattered much. Myles had simply become part of her routine, threaded through school lunches, evenings at Grey’s, walks home, texts during homework, and afternoons when neither of them had anything particular to do. More importantly, the night at his house had not made everything afterward strange. They had agreed to slow down, and then they had. Things had gone back to games and movies and stolen fries and kisses that ended where they wanted them to end. For a while, everything had felt easy. 

Then, sometime during the last week of October, Callie had started counting. 

The first time the thought came to her, it barely registered as a concern. She had been brushing her teeth before school, standing half awake in front of the bathroom mirror while Hannah complained through the door that Callie was taking forever, when some quiet part of her mind wondered whether it usually would have started by then. Hadn’t it? Callie dismissed the question before she finished rinsing her toothbrush. Periods were not trains. They did not arrive at precisely 8:17 on the third Thursday of every month because somebody had printed a timetable. She had been busy. School had been annoying. She had worked more hours at Grey’s after one of the part-time employees quit, and her chemistry teacher apparently believed students had no legitimate use for evenings or weekends. She had stayed up too late, eaten dinner at odd times, and spent most of October feeling as though somebody was always expecting her to be somewhere else. There were probably a hundred ordinary reasons for things to be a little off. 

That explanation worked for about a day. Then another passed, and another after that, until this Wednesday in November found Callie sitting on the edge of her bed with her phone balanced in one hand and the toes of one socked foot tapping against the carpet. Her room looked exactly as it had when she left for school that morning. Her backpack lay open beside the desk with one corner of her chemistry book protruding from it. A purple sweatshirt hung crookedly over the back of her chair. At the far end of the desk, her unfinished enclosure project sat beneath a loose tangle of jumper wires and tools, the little Raspberry Pi glowing red beneath them. Normally Callie would already have noticed the wire hanging too close to the edge or remembered the sensor problem she wanted to test. Today she barely looked at it. Her attention stayed fixed on the calendar filling her phone screen. 

She swiped backward from November into October and stared at the numbered squares. She knew perfectly well none of them had changed since the last time she checked. The calendar was not going to rearrange itself because she stared hard enough. Still, her thumb moved slowly across the screen as she tried to reconstruct the month around events she remembered more clearly than numbers. 

“Twenty-first,” she murmured, touching the date. She frowned almost immediately. “No. Maybe the nineteenth.” 

Callie swiped backward into September. The Thomas Game had been September twenty-ninth. That one she knew without checking. Maggie had stayed over the weekend afterward. There had been the Sunday her mother dragged everyone to Aunt Rebecca’s birthday dinner. One Friday Callie had worked late because her father needed to deal with a delivery. She remembered a chemistry class when she had spent most of the period wishing she had worn something more comfortable. Usually she never gave any of this much thought. It happened, it annoyed her for several days, and then it ended. Life continued. Exact dates had never mattered enough to remember. 

Now every square on the calendar seemed important. Callie counted through them again, touching each one with the pad of her thumb. Twenty seven. Twenty eight. Twenty nine. Her foot stopped tapping, and a slow pressure gathered low in her stomach. 

“No.” 

She started over from a different date, disliked the result even more, and counted again because surely she had made a mistake somewhere. It was almost insulting. She was good at math. This was not calculus. There were no hidden variables, no complicated equation, nothing that should require more than a calendar and the ability to count. The answer stayed the same. After staring at it for several seconds, Callie opened the calendar settings even though she knew that made no sense. Apple had not introduced some obscure October software bug capable of changing the passage of time, but she flicked through the options anyway, half hoping she had overlooked something embarrassingly obvious. 

A knock sounded against the bedroom door, and the knob turned almost at the same time. Callie jerked the phone against her chest as Hannah stepped halfway into the room. 

“Callie, whatcha doing?” 

Her younger sister wore black leggings and an oversized Ridgemont sweatshirt whose sleeves nearly swallowed her hands. Her ponytail bounced behind her as she came in with the same restless energy she brought nearly everywhere. Callie felt irritation flare through her much harder than Hannah deserved. 

“Don’t you ever knock?” She locked the phone and placed it facedown beside her, doing it quickly enough that she immediately worried Hannah had noticed. 

“I did knock.” Hannah stopped with one hand still on the knob, her expression shifting from curiosity to offense. 

“You knocked while you were opening the door. The whole point is that you wait until somebody tells you to come in.” 

“That still counts.” 

“No, it doesn’t.” 

“You come into my room all the time.” 

“That’s different.” Callie pointed toward herself. “Older sister. Different rules.” 

Hannah folded her arms. “How does being older make it different? That’s not fair.” 

“It just does. Life’s hard.” 

Hannah stamped one foot against the carpet. Normally that was the point where Callie knew the argument had crossed into serious territory, at least by Hannah standards. Once the foot stomp appeared, logic generally had another minute or two before it stopped being useful. Today Callie barely had the energy to care. Hannah narrowed her eyes, clearly considering whether to continue challenging the entire institution of older sibling privilege, before apparently remembering why she had come upstairs. 

“What were you doing?” 

“Nothing.” 

The answer came too quickly. Hannah’s gaze dropped almost immediately toward the phone lying facedown on the bed, and Callie followed it before looking back at her. 

“Seriously?” 

“I was just asking.” 

“You asked. I answered.” 

“You said nothing.” 

“Which is an answer.” Callie rubbed her thumb along the cuff of her sleeve and tried not to snap. Hannah was not really the problem. She had entered Callie’s room exactly the same way she always did. Callie was the one reacting differently, and Hannah seemed to sense it. The annoyance in her face had begun to give way to curiosity. 

Hannah lingered near the doorway, apparently trying to decide whether another question was worth the risk. Callie reached behind herself, grabbed one of the pillows against the wall, and tossed it toward her. There was almost no force behind it, but Hannah jumped backward dramatically when the pillow struck the frame and dropped to the carpet. 

“Hey!” 

“Out.” 

“You’re being weird.” 

“Hannah.” 

Something in Callie’s voice must have convinced her, because Hannah finally gave up. She bent down, scooped up the pillow, and tossed it back onto the bed. 

“Fine.” 

She stepped into the hallway and pulled the door almost shut behind her, only to reappear through the narrow gap a second later. 

“Someone’s in a bad mood.” 

Callie reached for the second pillow. 

Hannah’s eyes widened, and the door snapped shut before Callie could throw it. A moment later came the quick patter of socked feet heading toward the stairs, followed by a muffled laugh somewhere down the hall. Callie stayed where she was with the pillow still in one hand. Normally she might have gone after Hannah just to make good on the threat. She might have chased her downstairs, threatened to expose whatever crime her sister had committed most recently, or spent another ten minutes arguing over whether knocking technically counted if the door opened at the same time. Their fights often lasted longer than whatever started them because neither sister had much instinct for quitting while ahead. Today even that sounded exhausting. Callie let the pillow fall beside her and reached for the phone again. 

For several seconds she simply held it between both hands. Searching something should not have felt consequential. Callie searched things constantly: homework questions, programming errors, game walkthroughs, random things that occurred to her in the middle of the night and became impossible to ignore until she knew the answer. Once, at nearly two in the morning, she had spent forty minutes finding out whether octopuses dreamed because the question had occurred to her and apparently that had seemed more important than sleeping. This was just another question. She unlocked the phone, opened the browser, and tapped the search field. 

why can your period be late 

Callie stared at the words. Seeing them written down changed them somehow. Until now, everything had existed safely inside her head as dates and uncertainty, little observations she could dismiss one at a time whenever they became uncomfortable. The sentence gathered them together into a single question, something concrete and searchable, with answers waiting on the other side of one tap. Her thumb hovered over the search icon. Instead of pressing it, she held down backspace and watched the sentence disappear letter by letter until the field was empty again. The blankness made something in her chest loosen. She locked the phone and dropped it beside her, then picked it up again a few seconds later. 

“This is stupid,” she muttered. 

She opened Candy Crush. Bright pieces of candy filled the screen beneath cheerful music. Callie matched three reds, watched them disappear, then moved a purple piece while new candies dropped into place. A striped candy exploded across half the board in a shower of sparkles, and the game congratulated her with more enthusiasm than the achievement deserved. Normally she could waste twenty minutes on it without noticing. Today she made four moves before realizing she had no idea what she was doing because her attention remained fixed on October nineteenth, or maybe the twenty-first. Either way, the numbers refused to leave her alone. 

Callie swiped back to the browser and tried again. 

can stress make your period late 

She read the sentence twice. That sounded better. Stress was normal. School caused stress. Work caused stress. Her chemistry teacher caused enough of it to qualify as a hostile actor. Grey’s produced plenty whenever somebody called in sick and whatever plans Callie had made for Saturday stopped mattering. Hannah caused enough stress to qualify as a preexisting condition. The thought almost made her smile, but her thumb stayed above the search button. 

All she had to do was press it. Then she would have answers, probably thousands of them. Medical websites. Articles. Message boards. People asking exactly the same question. The problem was that Callie did not really want information. She wanted reassurance. She wanted the first result to tell her this happened all the time, that stress or sleep or hormones or growing or something equally ordinary could explain everything. She wanted to feel stupid for having spent the afternoon worrying. The search results might not give her that. They might give her other explanations too, ones she had been carefully avoiding. 

Callie deleted the sentence and this time did not try again. She dropped backward across the mattress, making the springs complain softly beneath her, and let the phone rest against her stomach while she stared at the ceiling. Around her, the house continued through its ordinary Wednesday afternoon sounds. The furnace kicked on somewhere below. Pipes shifted faintly behind the wall. From downstairs came the metallic clatter of something being set on the kitchen counter. Nothing was wrong, or at least that was what Callie kept telling herself. Nothing was wrong until there was evidence that something was wrong, and she did not have evidence yet. People were late all the time. Probably. She should know that. 

She was good at science, which was almost funny when she thought about it. Callie could explain the square-cube law. She could wire sensors to a Raspberry Pi, troubleshoot bad code, and spend an entire Saturday tracing a mechanical problem until she understood exactly why a servo was losing torque at the latch. Problems were supposed to have inputs and outputs. They produced evidence. If something malfunctioned, Callie could test it and figure out why. Her own body apparently had no interest in being that cooperative. 

Her phone chimed against her hoodie, and Callie looked at the screen. 

Maggie 

Normally she would have opened the message immediately, if only because ignoring Maggie tended to produce several more messages asking why she was being ignored. It was probably a picture, a complaint about homework, something stupid Luke had done, or whatever ongoing argument Maggie had decided required resolution before bedtime. Today even answering her best friend felt like work. Callie let the screen go dark and stared back at the ceiling. 

Her thoughts went to Myles anyway. Not anywhere dramatic. She remembered his living room under the blue light of the television, Mario Kart music playing while they talked, his hand warm around hers during the walk home. More than anything, she remembered his face when she told him they needed to slow down. He had listened. Okay. That had been it. No argument. No attempt to convince her she was overreacting. No effort to make her feel stupid. Afterward they had done exactly what they promised, and their relationship returned to games and movies and walks home and stolen fries and stupid texts. For weeks that had reassured her. 

Now her brain had developed the infuriating habit of attaching a question to every reassuring thought. Callie rolled onto her side and pulled her knees toward herself. 

“Stop.” 

It did not help. Maybe she had counted wrong. Maybe October had simply been weird. Maybe stress really could do this. Maybe tomorrow morning she would wake up and everything would be normal, and she would spend the rest of the day annoyed with herself for wasting an entire afternoon worrying about nothing. That sounded reasonable, and Callie liked reasonable. She liked things that could be tested, explained, and put back where they belonged. 

“Callie! Dinner!” 

Her mother’s voice carried up the stairs. Callie stayed where she was for another few seconds before the smell from downstairs reached her. Chili. Tomato, onion, cumin, browned beef, and chili powder had drifted out of the kitchen and worked their way beneath her bedroom door. Normally the smell would have gotten her moving before Sally finished calling her name. Today her stomach gave a small, uncertain turn. 

Callie sat up and waited until she was sure her voice would sound normal. “Coming!” 

It did. She considered leaving her phone on the bed but slipped it into the front pocket of her hoodie instead. Her eyes went once more to the calendar icon before she locked the screen. She could count again after dinner if she really wanted to, though she already knew what answer she would get. Callie shoved the phone deeper into her pocket and went downstairs. 

The warmth of the kitchen met her before she reached the dining room. Steam rose from the large bowl of chili Sally had set in the center of the oak table. Smaller dishes held shredded cheddar, sour cream, and chopped green onions, and a plate of cornbread sat near Stuart’s place with butter melting into the top piece. Hannah was already sitting in her usual chair and looked up the instant Callie entered. 

Callie knew that expression. “Don’t.” 

Hannah blinked innocently. “I didn’t say anything.” 

“You were going to.” 

“I was gonna ask for the cheese.” 

Callie looked at the bowl sitting less than a foot from Hannah’s hand. “The cheese is literally in front of you.” 

“See?” Hannah pulled it toward herself. “That’s what I was gonna ask.” 

Callie gave her a look and sat down. Across the table, Stuart was ladling chili into his bowl. He set the spoon down and glanced toward her. 

“Everything okay?” 

The question was casual. Callie reached for a piece of cornbread, partly because she wanted one and partly because it gave her hands something to do. “Yeah.” 

Stuart nodded and went back to dinner. Nobody stared at her. Nobody knew anything. That should have made Callie relax, but instead she became aware of the phone in her hoodie pocket whenever she leaned forward. 

Sally came in from the kitchen carrying her water and took the empty chair. “How was school?” 

“Fine.” 

Hannah immediately looked toward Callie. 

Callie lifted her eyes. 

Whatever Hannah had been about to say apparently failed a quick survival assessment. She looked down and covered her chili with shredded cheese instead. 

Conversation moved around Callie in the usual way after that. Stuart complained that somebody had abandoned an entire cart of frozen food beside the cereal aisle at Grey’s and half of it had to be thrown out before anyone noticed. Sally wanted to know who had been working that section. Hannah began picking kidney beans out of her chili and arranging them around the rim of her bowl. 

“Hannah, stop doing that,” Sally said. 

“I don’t like them.” Hannah poked another bean with her spoon. 

“You ate them last week.” 

“No, I didn’t.” 

“You’ve eaten this exact chili since you were four.” 

Hannah frowned at the bowl. “Maybe I didn’t know yet.” 

Stuart looked up. “Know what?” 

“That they’re gross.” 

Normally Callie would have joined in. She would have pointed out that Hannah had somehow developed a retroactive dislike for something she had willingly eaten most of her life, Hannah would have argued back, Stuart would have made it worse for his own entertainment, and Sally eventually would have told everybody to eat dinner. Tonight Callie listened instead. 

Outside the dining room windows, November darkness had swallowed the backyard and turned the glass reflective. Callie could see all four of them gathered beneath the warm pendant light: her father in his usual chair with too much cheese on his chili, her mother across from him, Hannah performing surgery on her dinner, and Callie sitting where she always sat. Nothing about the room looked different. She lifted a spoonful of chili, blew across the surface, and tasted it. Tomato and cumin came first, followed by the warmer bite of chili powder. It tasted exactly the way it always did, and her stomach accepted it without complaint. 

Maybe that was something. Maybe this really was stress. Maybe she had counted wrong. Maybe tomorrow would arrive and make the whole afternoon embarrassing in retrospect. 

Hannah started telling them about something that had gone wrong during dance practice, insisting before she had even reached the middle of the story that none of it had technically been her fault. Stuart interrupted with questions. Sally corrected one of Hannah’s details. Callie took another bite and listened, letting their voices fill the room around her. 

The next morning, Callie got up before her alarm. 

For several seconds she remained beneath the blankets, staring into the darkness of her bedroom while the reason she was awake settled back into place. Her phone sat charging on the nightstand. She did not need to check the calendar again. She had done enough counting the night before to know exactly what it would tell her, and another night of sleep had not produced the ordinary, embarrassing explanation she had been hoping to wake up to. 

Callie pushed the blankets aside and got dressed quickly, pulling on jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie before tying her hair back with almost no attention to what it looked like. The house was quiet when she slipped into the hallway. Hannah’s door remained closed. No television murmured downstairs, and the kitchen lights were still off when Callie reached the first floor. She grabbed her backpack, shoved her phone into her pocket, and called out that she needed to get to school early to use the library. 

It was a good excuse because it was exactly the kind of excuse nobody questioned. 

Why would anyone voluntarily get up early to go to a library if they didn’t have to? 

By the time Callie stepped outside, the November morning had barely decided to become morning. The sky over Ridgemont was a flat gray-blue, lighter along the eastern horizon but still dark enough that porch lights glowed up and down the street. Cold air found the gap at the collar of her hoodie almost immediately. She shoved her hands into her pockets and walked faster. 

Grey’s General Store was quiet when she reached it. 

Callie went around to the employee entrance at the back and let herself in with her key. The stockroom lights came on in harsh white rows overhead, revealing pallets, stacked boxes, shrink-wrapped cases of soda, and the familiar aisles of merchandise waiting to be moved out onto the sales floor. Usually the place felt different before opening, less like the store she had known her entire life and more like some unfinished version of it. No customers. No carts rattling across the tile. No register beeps or conversations drifting between aisles. Just refrigeration equipment humming through the walls and the occasional creak of the building settling into another cold morning. 

Callie adjusted the strap of her backpack and started walking. 

She passed canned goods. 

Paper products. 

Personal care. 

Then she kept going. 

She knew exactly where she needed to be. That was the stupid part. She had helped stock these shelves enough times to know which aisle contained what without looking at the labels. Instead she wandered farther down the row, glanced at a case of shampoo that had absolutely nothing to do with why she was there, then checked her phone as though the time might offer some new alternative. 

6:42. 

If she didn’t do this now, she was going to lose her chance. 

Callie stood still for a moment, staring down at the numbers on the screen. Once the store opened, employees would start arriving. Her dad would be around. Customers would be around. After school there would be Hannah and homework and dinner and all the normal pieces of her life crowding back in. 

She locked the phone. 

“Just do it.” 

The words were barely louder than the refrigeration hum. 

Callie turned around, walked back two aisles, and stopped in front of the section she had been avoiding. 

Pregnancy tests. 

There were several different kinds in the unopened cartons waiting for the shelves out front, which seemed unnecessarily complicated for something Callie wanted to have exactly one version of. She crouched and read the boxes. Digital. Early detection. Two tests. Three tests. Different brands promising answers in different numbers of minutes. 

Her face felt hot despite the cold she had carried in from outside. 

Callie grabbed one. 

Then she put it back and grabbed another because the first one had two tests in it, and for some reason having two felt like admitting she might need two. 

She stared at the replacement. 

This was ridiculous. 

They were all pregnancy tests. 

Callie shoved one box beneath her folded arm, immediately hated how visible it felt there, and tucked it inside the front pocket of her hoodie instead. The rectangular package bulged against the fabric. 

That was worse. 

She pulled it back out. 

“God.” 

Callie held it against her side and looked down both directions of the stockroom aisle. 

Nobody. 

Of course nobody. 

Still, she moved quickly. 

The employee bathroom was tucked off the back hallway between the break room and the office. Callie slipped inside, shut the door, and turned the lock. Only after hearing the small metallic click did she breathe normally again. 

The bathroom was painfully ordinary. White sink. Beige tile. Paper towel dispenser. A mirror with a faded sticker in one corner reminding employees to wash their hands. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed faintly. 

Callie set her backpack on the counter and stared at the box. 

For a few seconds she could not make herself open it. 

Yesterday she had been afraid to press a search button. 

This morning she had apparently decided the reasonable response was to steal a pregnancy test from her parents’ store before sunrise. 

She would deal with the stealing part later. 

Assuming there was a later that did not involve her mother murdering her. 

Callie tore open the cardboard. 

The folded instruction sheet seemed to contain enough information to operate heavy machinery. She unfolded it across the counter and read the English section once. Then again. On the third pass she realized she had somehow moved into the Spanish instructions without noticing. 

“Great.” 

She found English again. 

Read it. 

Checked the pictures. 

Read it again. 

There was nothing complicated about any of it. Callie understood that. She could follow instructions. She had assembled electronics from diagrams written by people who apparently believed labeling wires was beneath them. 

Still, she read the instructions one more time. 

Then she opened the inner wrapper. 

The test looked absurdly harmless. 

Callie stared at it in her hand, took a slow breath, and whispered, “Here goes nothing.” 

She followed the instructions. 

Afterward came the waiting. 

Callie sat inside the bathroom stall with her backpack between her shoes and the test resting where she could not see the result without deliberately looking. Her phone timer counted down beside her. Three minutes had never seemed particularly long before. Three minutes was waiting for popcorn. Three minutes was the amount of time Myles could spend deciding which game to play before Callie started complaining. Three minutes was nothing. 

Apparently three minutes could also last approximately six years. 

Callie stared at the stall door. 

There were scratches in the beige paint near the latch. She had seen them before. Hundreds of times, probably. Somebody had drawn a tiny smiley face in pen near the bottom corner and somebody else had tried to scrub it off badly enough that only half the face remained. 

Her phone vibrated. 

Callie’s stomach dropped. 

The timer had finished. 

She turned it off. 

Then she stayed exactly where she was. 

Looking at the test would not change what it said. Callie knew that. Results did not become better because you ignored them. That was not how information worked. 

Unfortunately, knowing that did absolutely nothing to make her want the information. 

As long as she did not look, there was still room for everything to be normal. There was still stress. Bad timing. A weird month. A body doing something annoying for no reason. There was still the possibility that she would laugh about this someday, although preferably not with anyone who knew her. 

Callie pressed both palms against her thighs. 

“Okay.” 

She did not move. 

“Okay.” 

Still nothing. 

Finally she leaned forward and grabbed the test in one quick motion before she could change her mind. 

Two lines. 

Callie stopped breathing. 

She stared at them. 

For one strange second her brain refused to translate the image into meaning. They were just two pink lines in a little plastic window. One darker than the other. Small. Ordinary. 

Then everything inside her seemed to drop at once. 

“No.” 

Callie grabbed the instruction sheet from the counter and unfolded it so quickly that the paper tore slightly along one crease. She found the diagram. 

One line. 

Two lines. 

Her eyes moved to the test. 

Back to the instructions. 

Back to the test. 

“No.” 

Maybe she had waited too long. 

She checked the time. 

No. 

Maybe she had read the wrong section again. 

English. 

Definitely English. 

Callie read the explanation anyway. Then she read it again, because apparently the previous ten times had not been enough. 

Two lines. 

Pregnant. 

Her hands started shaking. 

“No, no, no.” Callie shook her head as though the movement might somehow force the second line to disappear. “I can’t be pregnant.” 

The bathroom suddenly felt much too small. The fluorescent light was too bright. The fan was too loud. Callie could hear her own breathing over both of them, quick and shallow no matter how hard she tried to slow it down. 

“I’m fourteen.” 

Saying it aloud made everything worse. 

Her parents. 

The thought hit so hard that Callie pushed herself to her feet. 

“My parents are going to kill me.” 

She grabbed the wrapper from the counter, missed it, grabbed again, then tried to fold the instruction sheet and could not get the creases to line up. Her fingers would not stop trembling. 

“I need to go.” She shoved the paper into the box without folding it. “I need to go.” 

Go where, she had no idea. 

School? 

Maggie? 

Myles? 

Home was impossible. 

Standing here was impossible. 

Everything was impossible. 

Callie stuffed the box into her backpack, then froze with the test still in her hand. She could not leave that here. Someone would find it. Her dad could find it. Her mom could find it. Anyone could find it. 

The thought broke whatever control she had left. 

Tears blurred her vision. 

“No. Come on.” 

She wiped at her face with the heel of her hand, which accomplished almost nothing. Another tear slid down her cheek. Then another. 

Callie shoved the test into the torn box, jammed everything into her backpack, and yanked the bathroom door open. 

She made it two steps into the hallway before running directly into someone. 

The impact knocked the backpack from her shoulder and sent Callie backward. She hit the floor hard enough to jar her teeth, one hand catching uselessly against the tile while the other instinctively grabbed for the bag. 

“Callie?” 

She knew that voice. 

Her entire body went still. 

A pair of work boots stood in front of her. 

Callie slowly looked up. 

Her father was staring down at her. 

Stuart wore jeans and the dark Grey’s fleece he usually threw on for early deliveries, a clipboard tucked beneath one arm. His expression had started with surprise, but it changed almost immediately when he saw her face. 

“Callie?” He crouched in front of her. “Hey. What happened?” 

That was all it took. 

Whatever Callie had been holding together disappeared. 

Her face crumpled. She tried to speak and got nothing but a broken breath the first time. Stuart’s confusion sharpened into concern as he reached toward her, and Callie looked at her father through the tears spilling down her cheeks. 

“Daddy,” she managed. 

She had not called him that in years. 

Stuart froze. 

Callie clutched the strap of her backpack with both hands. 

“I messed up.” 

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