Cheshireville was the town next to Stonington, not ten minutes from Mormor’s house.

He’d said he wanted to work on cars with his dad. Of course they owned a garage.

I couldn’t make my fingers work on my smartphone. I couldn’t really speak, and the squeak I did manage was swallowed by the rushing whir of the car’s open windows. I stared at Devi’s texts, then glanced at Mom’s profile, my heart pounding, my head spinning. I tried to say something, failed and instead shook my head, pulling up my GPS on my phone and typing in Ianelli’s Garage. It took four tries thanks to misspellings, but I found it in the list and set our course.

“Exit fourteen,” I managed to say, sounding choked.

“What about it?”

“Get off there? Devi found Jack.”

Mom’s brow crinkled. “Jack who?”

“...truck guy. Cass’s dad.”

Mom’s mouth fell open. She looked as shell-shocked as I felt, but she quickly nodded and moved the car from the center lane to the right so we could get off the highway. We were wordless as we made our way to Cheshireville. A few times Mom looked like she’d talk, but she shook her head and licked her lips instead.

GPS said we were four minutes away from the garage by the time I replied to Devi. Omw w/mom.

Devi’s response was to call me. I picked up and cleared my throat, hoping the frog would vacate so I could actually say something. I needed the practice; it wouldn’t do me a whole heck of a lot of good to go see the sperm donor and not have the capacity for speech. I mean, the belly was conversation enough if he knew how to do math, but it’d be nice if I could manage anything beyond the obvious, too.

“I almost crapped myself,” she said in greeting. “We stopped for gas after picking up Dad’s dry cleaning and Jack waited on us. He didn’t recognize me, though, and I didn’t know if I should say anything? So I kept my mouth shut. I hope that was the right thing to do.”

“I—mmm. It’s fine,” I said, because really, it wasn’t her job to do that work for me.

“You okay?”

How was I supposed to answer that? On one hand, it was nice to know Jack’s last name. He was as responsible as I was for my Jabba-the-Link condition. Without his efforts, there’d be no diaper pins or diminishing line of sight on my feet. On the other hand, ignorance had been bliss, too. What if he wanted custody? What if he got mad at me that I hadn’t aborted? What if he—

“Hi, Devi,” Mom said, effectively stomping out my panic before it set in.

“Hi, Mom,” Devi said back, forcing me to repeat it.