Chapter 162 Not Yet

Chapter 162 Not Yet
The test sat on the bathroom counter for the full three minutes, Sofia perched on the edge of the tub with her phone timer counting down, Tyler leaning in the doorway pretending to check his own phone but clearly watching the clock just as closely.

Outside, a lawnmower droned somewhere down the street, ordinary and distant, and Sofia found herself listening to it with unusual intensity, grateful for anything that gave her mind somewhere to go besides the small counting numbers on her screen.

"You don't have to stand guard," she said.

"I want to stand guard. Moral support is a legitimate use of my time."

"Moral support usually involves less staring at a stick."

"I'm staring at my phone. The stick is incidental." He crossed the small bathroom and sat beside her on the tub's edge, close enough that his shoulder pressed warm against hers. "First month trying. Statistically, we probably shouldn't expect anything yet. I looked it up."

"You looked it up?"

"Multiple times. I wanted to know what to actually hope for versus what to brace against." He caught her looking at him and shrugged, unembarrassed. "Figured knowing the odds would help either way it went."

The timer went off. Sofia didn't move for a second, some old instinct wanting to delay the answer a moment longer, keep the possibility alive in its unresolved state just a little while more. Tyler didn't push, just waited, hand finding hers on the edge of the tub.

She picked it up one line.

"Not this month," she said, and felt the disappointment arrive smaller than she'd braced for, present but manageable, nothing close to the devastation she might once have expected from herself around something this large.

"Okay." Tyler squeezed her hand. "How are you feeling about it?"

"Actually okay. I thought I'd feel worse." She turned the test over in her hand, studying the single line like it might reveal something more if she looked long enough. "I think I expected this news to knock me sideways, given how much I've wanted it. Instead it just feels like information. Try next month information again."

"That's good, right? Feeling steady about it."

"I think so. I think it means I've built enough of a floor under myself now that one disappointment doesn't crack the whole foundation." She set the test down on the counter and leaned into him fully, letting him take some of her weight. "I used to catastrophize everything this size. One bad test result would have sent me spiraling for a week, convinced it meant something permanent about my whole future. This feels like this month's answer. Not the only answer there'll ever be."

"You've done a lot of work to get to that steadiness."

"We both have." She looked up at him. "You're the one who looked up statistics so you'd know what to hope for. That's something, Tyler. That's exactly the kind of careful, deliberate love I used to think didn't exist outside of books."

"I had good source material." He kissed the top of her head. "You taught me most of what careful looks like, even if you don't remember teaching it."

"I remember teaching you plenty of things. Mostly by accident." She smiled up at him, some of the day's disappointment already loosening its grip. "You've turned out to be a surprisingly good student, for someone who spends his working life getting hit into boards for a living."

"Best student you've got."

"My only student, technically."

"Even better odds for me, then."

They sat together on the edge of the tub a while longer, not rushing to get up, the disappointment settling into something smaller and more ordinary the longer they let themselves feel it without trying to fix it immediately. Eventually Sofia stood, disposed of the test, and caught her own reflection in the mirror, still herself, still whole, no different than she'd been ten minutes earlier despite the small letdown sitting quietly in her chest.

She thought, washing her hands, about all the versions of this same moment that might still lie ahead of them, other months, other three-minute waits, and found she could hold that thought without dread now, only a kind of settled curiosity about which month would eventually be the one.

Downstairs, Emma was building something elaborate out of couch cushions, narrating the structural engineering involved with real seriousness, and Sofia found herself grateful for the ordinary noise of it, the reminder that the rest of life continued regardless of what any single test result said.

"Everything okay?" Emma asked, glancing up. "You both look thoughtful."

"Everything's fine," Sofia said, and meant it, mostly, the particular fine of a person learning to hold both disappointment and hope in the same open hand without needing either one to win outright. "Just talking about grown-up things."

"The baby things."

"The baby things," Sofia confirmed, sitting down on the floor beside Emma's cushion fortress. "Not this month, as it turns out. But we'll keep trying."

Emma considered this with her usual gravity, then reached over and patted Sofia's knee with surprising tenderness. "That's okay. Good things sometimes take several attempts. I didn't master my times tables on the first try either."

Sofia laughed, unexpectedly, the sound loosening something tight in her chest that she hadn't fully realized was still there. "That's a very generous comparison, Emma."

"I am known for my generosity." Emma returned to her cushion fortress, entirely satisfied with her own wisdom. Tyler came down the stairs a moment later to find them both laughing on the living room floor, the whole afternoon settling back into its ordinary rhythm, disappointment folded gently into the wider, steadier shape of a life that had room for setbacks without being defined by them.

He didn't ask what the joke had been. He just sat down on the floor with them, added a cushion to Emma's fortress at her exacting direction, and let the ordinary Sunday afternoon carry them all forward, one small, unremarkable hour at a time, exactly the way the best hours of this whole year had tended to arrive.