Turn 103 of 233

Find out I am pregnant from Aleki. Unfortunately, he got into an accident and died before I can tell him

The nausea starts on a Tuesday. Lena is on site by five-forty, sweeping the slab on the third east side house, and the smell of the portland cement mix hits different — wrong, sour, the scent crawling into the back of her throat and turning her stomach inside out. She bends over the broom and vomits onto the fresh pour and the crew goes quiet behind her. Walt says nothing. Marco hands her a bottle of water without a word. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and picks up the broom and finishes the sweep and the nausea passes and she doesn't think about it.

It comes back Wednesday. And Thursday. Friday morning she's three miles into the run and her stomach cramps hard enough to stop her — the first time anything has stopped her on a run in months — and she stands on the river path with her hands on her knees and the sweat running through the grime and the cramp is low and deep and familiar in a way she can't place. She finishes the thirty miles. The cramp stays with her through the cooldown and through the shower she doesn't take and through the eggs and rice and toast she eats on the balcony afterward. The body is telling her something and she is not listening because the body has been telling her things for two years and most of them have been *more* — more weight, more food, more miles, more iron — and this is different and the difference is what makes her ignore it.

Saturday she buys the test. She buys three. She takes all three on the balcony floor squatting over the concrete and the lines appear — two lines, pink, clear, all three tests, all three positive. She sits on the concrete and holds the sticks in her massive grimy hand and the tribal ink is sharp on her fingers and the tests are small and pink and the city hums below and the fan turns above and the thought that moves through her is not panic. Not joy. Something older and heavier. The body is doing something new. The body is building something she didn't plan for and can't control and the wish is silent on the subject — no warm hum, no quiet thought drifting through her mind. Just the tests. Just the two lines.

She picks up the phone to call Aleki. She has his number saved under his name — no emoji, no nickname, just *Aleki* — and her thumb hovers over the call button and the screen is bright in the morning sun and she thinks about what she'll say. Something direct. Something structural. *I'm pregnant. It's yours. We should talk.* The words are clear in her head. She presses call. It rings. It rings. It rings. Voicemail — his voice, deep and slow, the Samoan vowels rounded, the freight-worker cadence. She hangs up. She texts instead: *Call me when you can. Important.* The message delivers. The read receipt appears. He doesn't respond. She waits on the balcony with the tests in her hand and the sun climbing and the city below and the body five hundred and twenty-five pounds and carrying something new.

Monday morning Walt pulls her aside on site. His face is wrong — not the usual calm, not the steady crew-foreman expression. He looks at her the way he looked at her the first day she showed up barefoot, like he's seeing something he doesn't have a category for.

"Did you know Aleki?" he says. "The big guy. Port. Samoan."

"I know him," Lena says.

"He didn't make it. Container shift on Thursday. The rigging failed. He was underneath."

Lena stands on the site — barefoot, naked, five hundred and twenty-five pounds, tribal ink from ankle to neck, grime in every crease — and the words land the way a beam lands when the crane drops it. Heavy. Final. No bounce. The ground absorbs it and it's gone. She stands there and Walt stands there and the crew is behind them and the site is quiet and the third house is half-framed and the tests are in her apartment and the text she sent is sitting on a phone that is at the bottom of the bay or in an evidence locker or in the hand of a man who will never read it. She doesn't speak. The body holds. The body always holds. She picks up her hammer and walks to the west wall and starts framing and the nail gun drives the first spike and the sound is sharp and clean and final.