Before I could stop myself, I started ripping every last note to shreds. If he could cut me out of his life without any hesitation, then I could cut him out, too. I wanted to be completely clean of him, scrub every last touch from my skin.

After the final letter was destroyed, I grabbed my phone from my pocket and grinned at the pile of tiny paper scraps scattered all around me. I had just barely finished deleting his number—one final tie to him—when the phone started ringing and vibrating in my hands. I jumped, startled by the sudden noise, and the phone slipped through my fingers and landed on my stomach with a jolt.

A cold, panicky sweat swept over me as I sat up and wrapped my hands around my belly. That wasn’t enough to hurt my baby, was it? It was just a little phone, and it hadn’t fallen from more than a foot in the air. Surely that wasn’t enough to cause any actual damage. Right? I breathed in and out ten times, slowly, trying to convince myself that everything was absolutely fine.

And I knew it was, of course—but still all I could think about was what and where exactly the phone had hit. Was it his or her tiny, delicate head? Fragile little fingers or fragile little toes?

“I’ll be more careful,” I whispered, rubbing my stomach in soft, soothing circles. “I promise I’ll be more careful.”

His or her head, fingers, toes . . . ? Did I want to know which pronoun it would be? Did it matter, really? I could know soon, very soon, if I wanted to. I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself holding a baby in my lap. Did I see a little boy in a sailor shirt? A little girl with a bright pink sparkly bow on her head? Probably a gift from her aunt Gracie, I thought, smiling to myself. Gracie would much rather have a tiny niece to fawn over, that I knew for sure.

Gracie, I thought, my stomach suddenly clenching with guilt. I hadn’t been spending enough time with her lately. I’d been too busy thinking about myself and the baby, and worrying about Dad, Izzy, Nate—the people who weren’t behind me. I had it all wrong, I realized. The people I should focus on were the ones who were still there. And Gracie, despite her slipup with Ava, was most certainly still there. She deserved a big sister who appreciated her.

My phone buzzed again, and the screen lit up with a missed call from an unknown number. From the area code and the first three digits, I could tell it was someone from town. I read back over the numbers and froze. The last four numbers looked familiar. Very familiar. Was it Nate? I’d gotten so used to calling him on my cell, his digits always safely stored and accessible with a single tap, that I couldn’t remember the full number. I knew that there was a seven and a nine, I could remember that much. But the rest was fuzzy in my mind, a clump of random numbers that I’d never bothered to memorize.

Of course he would call then, right after I’d finally found the strength to erase him. It was as if he’d known somehow—he’d known that I was ready to let him go, and he wasn’t ready to let that happen. A small flame of hope flickered in my chest. Nate wanted to talk to me. He still cared.

I held my breath and stared at the phone, willing the voice mail alert to pop up. Instead the phone started ringing and shaking again, the same mysterious number glowing up at me from the screen.

“Hello,” I said, gasping, answering before I could convince myself to resist. If Nate wanted to talk to me, then I would talk to him. I owed him that much. We owed each other that much.

“Mina?” The voice sounded husky, familiar, but it wasn’t Nate’s.

My hope was extinguished just as quickly as it had been lit, a burst of icy cold disappointment filling the dark empty space left behind.

I recognized the voice, though. It was, it was . . . My mind scrambled to match face with tone, trying to pull itself together in the midst of all my crumbling excitement.

“Mina? Are you there?”

The connection snapped together in my head. Jesse. It was Jesse.

“How did you get my number?”

“I’m doing great, actually, thanks so much for asking.” He laughed, and I could feel him grinning through the phone.

“Sorry, Jesse, I didn’t mean for it to sound that way. I was just . . . I was expecting someone else, that’s all. You surprised me.”

“Yeah, no problem,” he said, his voice sounding slightly deflated. “I got your number from the call list at work. I just wanted to check in after last night and make sure you were okay.” He paused. “Are you? Okay, I mean?”

I smiled, leaning back to prop myself against the wall. “I’m okay. Better at least. Thanks for asking.”

“Yeah, no problem. We’re in this together, remember? I mean, I’m not letting Iris down, no way. I listen to a lady who can implant innocent people with babies at will.”

The laugh that burst from my mouth was so loud and so unexpected that I had to glance around the tree house, just to be certain that the sound had actually come from me.

“Thanks for that. Really. I think you’re the first person to successfully make me laugh about Iris, and I wouldn’t have thought it possible. But can you watch that whole ‘we’re in this together’ business, at least in public? I wouldn’t want people getting the wrong idea, if you know what I mean.” I blushed at the thought, glad that he couldn’t see my cheeks through the phone.

“Don’t worry about that. Firstly, I have no one to tell. No friends, remember? Total loner?”

He was joking, trying to make light of his situation, but there was nothing funny to me about him being so lonely. I barely knew him, though I already knew without a doubt that he didn’t deserve that kind of solitary existence.

“And secondly,” he started again, “this isn’t my story to tell. It’s yours, Mina. Your story. And that’s all there is to it.”

“Thanks,” I said, whispering into the phone. I wanted to say more, but he’d managed to catch me entirely off guard. Again.

“Anyway, I’m in the middle of a shift at Frankie’s right now, so I should get back to work. But I wanted to ask if I could give you a ride to school on Monday, so we can at least go in together. I’m sure no one really knows anything and it’s all going to be fine, but . . . I don’t know, you seemed pretty nervous last night. I just thought you might not want to be alone Monday morning, that’s all.”

“Sure,” I said, nodding to the empty tree house. “That would be nice.”

Nice wasn’t the first word that had popped into my mind. The idea of driving to school with him made me much more nervous than the idea of driving to school without him.

The mildly offbeat boy who grinned all the time and spent his lunches with sci-fi books rather than human beings made me so nervous, I realized, that the phone was suddenly hot against my ear, the hand gripping it prickling with sweat.

We hung up after I gave him my address, and I sat for a minute staring at my phone, replaying the conversation in my head.

Jesse? Was I . . . Did I like Jesse? I stared at my still-clammy palm as if it had betrayed me somehow. I couldn’t like Jesse, not now, not when I was still just getting over Nate. And certainly not while I was pregnant and trying to sort out my already too complicated life.

Jesse was my new friend. That was all.

That had to be all.

My stomach growled, thankfully, because I was happy to think about something else, anything else. I realized I’d never thought to eat breakfast, not between the fight with Izzy and Gracie’s confession. I stood up and stretched, my back aching from lying against the rough wooden floor. After doing my best to shove most of the note scraps into one of the buckets from the makeshift table, I gave the room one final glance and made my way toward the beaded doorway.

A flash of neon pink on the mossy ground below caught my eye and I froze, one foot perched on the top rung of the ladder.