Page 33 of Salty Pickle

Matilda licks my hand until she’s sure she’s gotten every grain.

Then I rest one hand on my belly and the other on Matilda. I have leftovers to eat tomorrow. A goat farm to live on. A way to make a little money.

All is well in my world.

And I can’t stay awake a minute more…

10

COURT

Pregnant women sure sleep a lot.

I glance back at Lucy as we enter the Lincoln Tunnel.

She’s resting on her goat, which looks up at me with half-lidded eyes. They’re both relaxed.

I let out a long breath. Things are finally going the right direction.

This is the first time I’ve been able to pause and think about this situation I’ve been thrust into.

Due to thrusting into her.

A baby?

With this woman?

My father, who delivered a threat-laden speech to me in high school about girls, protection, and always doing the right thing, will kick my ass.

Except I did use protection. And wasn’t I doing the right thing?

As we get farther from the island, I begin to wonder.

Lucy is absolutely convinced the baby is mine. She’s announced it to everyone, which is a different, separate problem.

I still don’t know her last name.

Devin should have put it on the rental when they got together to fill out the form. I flick my phone awake and find the email he forwarded from the farm.

Lucy Brown.

I google her to see what comes up, not sure what I’ll find.

There’s a Facebook profile, which surprises me since she seems to hate technology. I click on it.

She kept it up while in college, which is another unexpected detail. Based on what I’ve seen of her so far, shoeless, traveling with a goat, I wouldn’t have expected her to manage coursework, computers, and being surrounded by people so unlike her.

But she graduated from the University of Boulder in—I read it three times to be sure.

Finance?

That would require software, spreadsheets, data.

So this all-natural lifestyle, the yurt, the yoga is all new.

Okay, not totally. There are check-ins at a yoga studio from way back. I scroll through what personal posts are public. They stop abruptly five years ago, right around when she would have graduated. She seems to be twenty-seven.

She had a boyfriend named Steve back then, one she never changed her relationship status with before abandoning the platform.

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