The test showed two lines on a Tuesday morning in March, and Eleanor Vance sat on the bathroom floor of her studio apartment for forty minutes, watching the steam from her abandoned shower curl up toward the ceiling like a question mark.
She was twenty-three years old. She had $847 in her checking account. She worked as a receptionist at a dental office and took night classes in accounting at the community college. She had no partner. She had told no one about the man from the Christmas party, the one with the wedding ring he'd hidden in his pocket, the one whose name she couldn't remember now without shame.
The first thought was not about the baby. The first thought was about her mother, dead three years, and how Eleanor had promised herself she would never become the kind of woman her mother had been—trapped, bitter, resentful, always whispering to her daughter that she'd "given up everything" for her.
But the second thought was worse. It was the thought that would come back to her in the dark hours before dawn, for the next six months and for the rest of her life:
What if I am exactly like her?
Eleanor touched her stomach, still flat, still her own. Inside, cells were dividing. A heart was beginning to form, no larger than a poppy seed, but already beating—she would learn this later, in a pamphlet that would make her cry in the waiting room of the free clinic. Already beating. Already separate from her. Already its own person, making its own blood, dreaming its own dreams in the dark.
She did not know, sitting on that bathroom floor, that she was part of a story as old as civilization itself. She did not know that women had faced this exact moment—this terror, this love, this impossible mathematics of love divided by resources—for ten thousand years. She only knew that the steam was dissipating, and the floor was cold, and she was suddenly, irrevocably, not alone in her body.