Turn 104 of 233

Call Janet — she needs to tell someone.

The drive home takes forty minutes. Lena sits in the truck with both hands on the wheel and the seat pulled back as far as it goes and the belly resting against the lower rim and the tribal ink dark on her forearms and the phone is in the cup holder and she doesn't pick it up. She drives the route she knows — site to highway, highway to exit, exit to the apartment — and the truck is quiet and the windows are down and the Florida air comes in thick and warm and she doesn't turn on the radio. The silence is the right shape for what she's carrying. The silence is load-bearing.

She parks. Sits in the truck for three minutes. The engine ticks as it cools. Her hands are still on the wheel. The calluses are rough against the grip and the grime is in the creases of her knuckles and she looks at her hands — the hands Jess left bare, the hands that still feel everything — and the tests are upstairs. Three pink sticks on the balcony concrete. Two lines each. She lets go of the wheel. She picks up the phone.

Janet answers on the first ring. "Lena?"

"Mom." The word comes out flat. Steadier than she expected. The steadiness is the construction steadiness — the voice she uses on site when something is wrong and the crew needs to hear calm.

"I need to tell you something."

The silence on the line is different from Aleki's silence. This silence is warm. This silence is a kitchen in a house she grew up in, a woman standing at a counter with the phone pressed to her ear, waiting. Janet has been waiting for this call for months — not this call, but a call. Any call. The weekly check-ins are scheduled and careful and this is not scheduled and not careful and they both know it.

"I'm pregnant," Lena says. She says it the way she says everything now — direct, structural, the load path clear.

"I found out Saturday. The father is dead. He died Thursday. A container accident at the port. I didn't know I was pregnant when he died. I tried to call him. He didn't answer."

The line is quiet for a long time. Lena hears Janet breathing — the slow, controlled breathing of a woman who is processing something that doesn't fit into the categories she has. Then Janet's voice comes back and it is not the cracked voice from the parking lot. It is the voice of a mother who has raised two children and buried a parent and held a marriage together through years of silence and knows what to do when the ground shifts.

"How far along are you?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen a doctor."

"You need to see a doctor."

"I know."

"Lena." Janet's voice is firm now. Not sharp. Firm. The voice that used to say *eat your vegetables* and *do your homework* and *call your brother* — the voice that has been quiet for two years because Lena didn't need it and needs it now.

"Are you okay?"

Lena sits on the balcony floor with the phone pressed to her ear and the three tests are on the concrete beside her and the sun is going down and the city is orange and the fan turns above her and the body is five hundred and twenty-five pounds and the body is carrying something new and the wish is silent and the something is hers. She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it.

"I don't know," she says. It is the first honest thing she has said in months that isn't about construction.