Ava had turned in her chair, giving him her full attention.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “to hit you with this.”

Hearing her voice brought him back to the present. He was aware of his racing heart and the tightness in his chest and throat.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. Her tone was consolatory but also hesitant and cautious, and it made him think of a bomb squad guy he’d seen in a movie. Ava had seen him explode, knew how quick he was to anger.

But the anger didn’t come, even when he begged for it. He was in the right here, no question—she deserved to feel his full wrath for keeping something like this from him for so long—but he couldn’t summon his rage, or any other feeling for that matter, and it made him wonder if he had gone into shock. He probably had.

He opened his mouth, swallowed. Opened his mouth again and tried to speak but didn’t know where to start, what to ask first.

Ava wiped at her face. “Let me tell you when it happened,” she said gently. “How everything happened. Okay?”

Sebastian looked down at his hands, wishing he had a drink there, because this was a time when he should be able to drink. He listened to her explain how, on the night he ended up accidentally killing an undercover cop playing gangbanger, her period had been over a week late.

“I planned on telling you earlier in the day, when we went to the Jack in the Box,” Ava said, Sebastian remembering how they’d gone there to fill up on three-for-one tacos before hitting the house party. “I thought I might be pregnant, and I wanted to tell you, but I also wasn’t sure, and I was terrified of, you know, taking a test. When we sat down to eat, though, I couldn’t get the words out, so I decided I’d wait till later, at the party, after I’d had a few glasses of wine.”

But she realized she couldn’t drink if she was pregnant, and while she was at the party, sipping a Coke, the constant “Am I or am I not?” ate at her to the point where she thought she was going to scream. She ducked out, walked five blocks to a convenience store, and bought a test and took it with her into the store bathroom, the tiny space reeking of urine because someone, maybe more than one person, had pissed all over the floor and toilet seat. Squatting over the toilet, she peed on the stick as instructed, and then she paced inside the tight space, her heart pounding with dread and her gaze bouncing back and forth from her reflection in the scratched-out mirror to the crude drawings of genitals and names and numbers for blow jobs and hand jobs, Ava praying to God to please let it not be true—it couldn’t be true, because she had been careful.

Ava said, “I took the test with me outside and walked around the corner. I was so scared, I couldn’t breathe.”