“Hey, Paul?” The words get lost in the roar of the engine, but there’s no stopping now. Not when I’ve finally summoned my courage. I tap him on the shoulder and try again. “Paul.”

He pulls back on the throttle, slowing the boat to a crawl. “What’s wrong? Did you forget something?”

I shake my head. An hour ago, I left the house with exactly two items, the boat keys and my cell phone, both of which are here with me now. The keys dangle from the ignition, and I tucked my cell in the cubby by my seat, along with the Curtis Cottage drawings.

“You know how I’ve been feeling kinda out of sorts?” I don’t have to tick off my symptoms—the bouts of nausea, the bone-tiredness I can’t seem to shake. Paul brought me chicken soup from the market in town, covered me with blankets whenever I’d nap on the couch.

“You had the flu.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But who has the flu for three whole weeks?”

I stare at him hard, waiting for the realization to hit, but Paul’s face is a complete blank. I can’t tell if it’s because he doesn’t understand where I’m going with this, or if he’s trying to contain his panic—or worse, suspicion. Will he accuse me of flicking my pills into the toilet, of forgetting to take them on purpose? His mother certainly will.

I look away. “Anyway, it wasn’t the flu.”

He reaches up and kills the engine. All around us, the air goes quiet the way it can only here, in the middle of a lake cradled between mountains and trees. A strange kind of muffled silence punctuated by the far-off cry of a hawk.

Paul swivels on his seat to face me, his voice laced with worry. “What is it? Are you sick?”

“No.” My answer is swift, and I make sure to look him in the eyes. Paul’s already lost one wife. Of course his mind would go there. I probably should have led with my good health. “No, I’m fine. Better than fine. Healthy as can be.”

My heart is pounding now, but that’s to be expected. I think of the matching pink lines on the sticks, wrapped in toilet paper and buried at the bottom of the wastebasket. The instructions said one line may come out lighter than the other, but any hint of a second line meant I was pregnant. All three times I pulled a new one from the wrapper and peed on it just in case the ones before it were defective, the lines were so pink they were almost purple.