Page 2 of No One Can Know

She’d waited too long again. Frozen up. He lowered his arm and sighed. “I got laid off,” he said, tossing a little shrug in at the end of the words.

She blinked at him, unsure what the proper facial expression to greet this news should be. How did one convey sympathy while also conveyingwe are truly, deeply screwed?

“Obviously it’s terrible timing,” he said.

“Nathan, wejusthad our offer accepted on the house,” Emma said, voice shaking. “We paid the earnest money.” More than ten thousand dollars. With multiple offers, their agent had told them it would help them compete.

“I’m aware of that,” he said, voice a bit clipped now.

Emma pressed her palms to her face. Her cheeks were hot, her hands cold. She could still feel the remnants of the ultrasound gel, dried to tackiness under the waistband of her jeans.

She walked past him, shoulder bumping against his. She crossed the kitchen to the countertop and planted her hands on the Formica surface, staring at the grease stain that had been there when they moved in three years ago.

She straightened up. “Have you called Justin yet?” Justin was the man handling their mortgage, who had suggested that given Emma’s spotty employment history and anemic income, Nathan should be the only one on the mortgage application. Emma had nodded along when he’d said to put the remaining medical bills, credit card bills, and car loan under her name to maximize Nathan’s borrowing power, so now here she was in the negative—on paper, only on paper, they were a team—while Nathan smiled his way into half a million dollars’ worth of house on credit. “The offer. There are—what are they—contingencies. We get our money back if the inspection doesn’t go through, that kind of thing. Is there—”

“I got laid off before we made the offer,” he said. She startled, her mouth dropping open. He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “I had another job lined up. The house was perfect, and I was going to be able to start this week and it wouldn’t even matter, they were payingmore, it was golden, and then.…”

“No job,” Emma said, voice strangled nearly to silence. “Nathan, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because it was handled!” he said. “If I’d said anything, the loan could have fallen through. Better to have the new job sorted first. Then the project funding got canceled at the last minute. The position was eliminated.”

A hot fist of nausea lodged behind her breastbone. She’d been feeling a bit queasy lately. Nothing extreme. Not enough to notice, to wonder, not when there was the house hunt and then the mad scrambleof putting together offers and getting the preapproval. Not when she’d had her period like clockwork (breakthrough bleeding, they’d called it, not uncommon) and had only gone in for an answer to her sudden, overwhelming fatigue.

The house had felt like a mistake from the start. The letter had arrived informing them that the duplex was going up for sale and they had sixty days to vacate, and she’d wanted to start looking for a new apartment. But Nathan had pointed out that with the rental market what it was, and with him finally having steady employment after a decade of patchwork contracts and canceled projects, it might be the perfect time to buy.

She’d blanched at the idea. Her work, which had once kept them afloat, had cratered after the accident, during the long weeks of her recovery. The rest had dried up after her biggest client went under and others tightened their belts. New websites weren’t the priority when they were trying to keep the lights on. But Nathan had finally landed a permanent position. One that paid well—well enough to (mostly, nearly, almost) pay off their small mountain of credit card debt, Nathan’s student loans, the medical bills from the accident.

“Because I technically lied about my employment, we can’t get the earnest money back,” Nathan was saying. “And we were already on the bubble with the loan approval. Justin doesn’t think there’s any way he can push it through, even if I miraculously get a new job offer tomorrow.” He collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table.

Her mind churned quickly over the possibilities. The closing date would have been a tight turnaround as it was. Finding another rental wasn’t an option until Nathan got a job, not without the cash that had now vanished into the hole of the offer that was too high but worth it,completely worth it, when you think about our life there, our future.

He was looking at her like he was waiting for her to tell him what to do. Because she always knew what to do. She was always the one with the plan.

“I’m pregnant,” Emma said. Fingers curled over the edge of the counter. Gaze on the cheap vinyl tile. Were those meant to be roses in the corners? They looked like splotches of mildew.

“What?”

Her eyes flicked up. He stared at her, mouth slack, hair falling boyishly over one eye. Dark hair, blue eyes, a small scar on his chin she liked to set her thumb against right before she kissed him. They’d met at a coffee shop, back when she couldn’t even afford internet, so she’d hidden herself in the corner away from the baristas’ annoyed glances and ordered plain black coffee and nothing else for hours at a time as she worked. He’d been sitting at the table next to hers. When he bought her a chocolate croissant, she tried to wave him off, but he said it was for his sake, since her growling stomach was distracting him.

She took the croissant. And the latte that followed. It was a week before he actually asked her out, to a mediocre movie and good Italian food, and kissed her a gentlemanly kiss good night at her doorstep before she slid her hand into his hair and pulled him to her hungrily, drew him inside the tiny studio, undressed him in the dark.

He told people he’d fallen in love with her over pastries and coffee, but when they were alone he confessed it had been that night with her teeth against his neck, the certainty of her, the hard edges that she had hidden so well.

She told him she’d fallen in love with him with the taste of butter on her lips that first morning, but it was just a story. She had no idea when she’d fallen in love with him. But people needed stories to make sense of things, and she had learned to give them what they needed.

Now his face was pale. His lips shut. That face that couldn’t hide anything failing to hide his unhappiness. “You’re on the pill,” he said.

“It happens,” Emma replied helplessly. She’d missed a pill here or there when she was sick, distracted, traveling. Far from perfect use. “You want children.” That was the point of the house, with its extra bedrooms.

“I do. Of course I do. It’s just—now—” His throat convulsed. “If I can’t find a job… We won’t even have a place tolivein a few weeks. We can’t.”

“What are you saying?” she asked.

Nathan wanted children, and she had saidyes, okay, someday, because she wanted to be the person who could want that. Now, though, it was his face that had taken on a gray pallor. His eyes that dropped to the table. “It’s not the right time. Maybe things work out. But what if they don’t? And I wouldn’t want to wait, and then—when it’s further along—”

Emma put her hand against her abdomen. Still flat, no outward sign at all, and she realized she had already made a decision.

“I’m keeping it,” she said.

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