Chapter 9: Positive
A single shard of the shattered plastic test casing, no larger than a fingernail, had skittered all the way to the base of the bathtub. Catalina stared at it, her eyes unfocused, as if the meaning of the universe was etched into its white, brittle curve. The rest of the debris was a spray of innocuous trash around her bare feet on the cool octagonal tiles. The two pink lines were gone, obliterated, absorbed by the grout. But their image was burned onto the back of her retinas, searing through every other thought.
Pregnant.
The clinical garden. The rough grain of the cedar table biting into the backs of her thighs. The searing fullness, the shocking, possessive heat as he emptied into her. She’d asked for it. She’d demanded it. Paint my fucking insides with it. A crude, desperate incantation. He’d obeyed.And now this.
A low, wounded sound escaped her, not quite a sob, more like the air being punched from a bellows. She was naked, damp from her interrupted shower, a towel abandoned on the vanity. Goosebumps prickled her arms. The morning light through the frosted window was cheerful, obnoxiously so. It highlighted the steam still clinging to the mirror, the soft blues and greens of her carefully chosen towels. A normal bathroom. A normal morning.
Her gaze drifted from the plastic shard to her own reflection in the mirror over the sink. The ghost of her twin stared back.Pale. Dark circles under eyes that looked hollowed out, older than thirty-five. Her hair, dark and wet, clung to her neck and shoulders. Slowly, almost involuntarily, her right hand lifted from her side and flattened against her lower abdomen. The skin was warm, smooth.Absolutely unchanged. Nothing to feel. Yet everything had changed inside that silent, secret space.
Dominic's child.
The thought was a depth charge. It didn’t explode with panic or joy. It simply sank, its weight pulling her entire being into a cold, dark trench of impossible consequence. This wasn’t a flickering flame to be guarded or a bridge to be burned. This was a forge. It would take the raw, twisted metal of their bond and hammer it into something utterly new, with a life of its own. A third heart beating in a room built for two.
She remembered the willow branches, their shameful curtain. The distant chime of the clinic's clock. The weary peace that had settled on her afterward. Now the quiet can come back. What a fucking joke. The quiet had been a tidal wave gathering force offshore, and now it had crashed over her, leaving this terrible, fertile silt in its wake.
Her fingers curled, nails biting into the soft flesh of her belly. A sharp, clarifying pain. She welcomed it.
“Okay,” she whispered to her reflection. Her voice was rusty, unused. “Okay.”
The first thing she did was not call him. That instinct—the primal, cellular urge to share this cataclysm with its other creator—was a muscle she had spent six months in therapy learning to deny. It throbbed, insistent, but she didn’t reach for her phone charging on the vanity.
Instead, she moved. She got to her feet, her legs steady despite the tremor in her hands. She found a hand broom and dustpan in the cabinet under the sink and meticulously swept up every last fragment of the test, every speck of its evidence. She dumped it into the small metal trash can, then tore a few sheets of toilet paper and buried the debris under them. Out of sight. A secret in the garbage.
Then she finished her shower. The water was lukewarm now. She washed her hair methodically, scrubbed her skin, as if she could cleanse herself of the knowledge. It didn’t work. The knowledge was in her bloodstream. It was her bloodstream now, feeding the tiny, dividing cluster of cells she carried.
Dressed in soft jeans and a grey sweater, she made coffee. The mundane ritual—grinding beans, the gurgle of the French press, the rich aroma—was an anchor. She carried the mug to her small balcony overlooking the quiet, tree-lined street. She had moved here a month after her discharge, a clean, anonymous one-bedroom. A place for the “cured” Catalina to build a new life. She sipped the bitter coffee, her mind not racing, but plotting with a cold, detached clarity.Options. They presented themselves like stark, unadorned doors.
Door One: Termination. A clinical visit. A different kind of silence. She could erase the consequence. She could go back to being Dominic’s twin, his sin, his satellite. The bond would remain, polluted but contained. A part of her—the part that had smashed the test—ached for this simplicity. A return to the known hell.
Door Two: Keep it. This door had no handle, no window. It opened onto a wilderness. It meant her body changing, her life contorting around this new reality. It meant telling him. It meant… what? A family? The word was grotesque, a perversion of the concept. It meant a child growing up in the long, distorted shadow of a love that had no name. It meant stares, whispers, a lifetime of explanations that would all be lies. It meant giving this unborn thing a soul already scarred by its origin.
Door Three: Disappear. Take the small savings she had, the skills she possessed that had nothing to do with last names or garages, and vanish. Have the child somewhere no one knew Catalina Toretto. Raise it alone, with a story about a dead father. Spare it the gravity of its own genesis. Spare him the weight of a choice she had forced upon them both in the garden.
Her coffee grew cold. The sun climbed higher, warming the balcony railing. A jogger passed below, headphones on, lost in a podcast. A normal person with normal problems.
The fury arrived then, not as a hot rush, but as a slow, spreading chill. It wasn’t directed at Dominic, not entirely. It was directed at biology. At the cruel, efficient machinery of her own body that had taken the one act of absolute, taboo honesty she had ever committed and turned it into a lifelong sentence. She had wanted proof. She had wanted a mark. And her body, in its ruthless literalism, had provided the ultimate one. It felt like a betrayal by her own flesh.
Her phone buzzed on the glass table beside her. A text.Not Dom.
Mia: Hey.Checking in. You seemed… quiet when I called yesterday. Everything okay? Want to come over for lunch? Brian’s making his famous terrible pancakes.
Catalina stared at the screen. Mia. The sister who wasn’t a twin.The conduit. The keeper of the ugly confession. The one person who might, in time, notice a change in her body. A wave of sheer loneliness, so profound it was vertigo, washed over her. She wanted to lay her head on her sister-in-law’s kitchen table and sob. She wanted to scream it. She wanted to be held and told it would be a beautiful, miraculous thing, that love in any form creates life worth having.
She couldn’t. She had already burdened Mia with the image of their coupling. To burden her with the fruit of it was an act of cruelty she couldn’t commit.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Cat: All good. Just tired. Raincheck on the pancakes. Tell Brian to practice.
She hit send. The lie was smooth and easy.
The next text came less than a minute later. This one was from him. Just his name on the screen. Dom. Her heart did not flutter. It clenched, a fist around that new, third heart.
She didn’t open it. She watched the notification sit there, a tiny, digital ghost of him. He was probably at his rented house, or under the GTO. He would be carrying his own guilt about Letty, about the fracture he had caused. He would be thinking of the garden, maybe with a brutal kind of nostalgia, maybe with shame. He would have no idea that the act had transcended memory. It had become a blueprint.
She finally picked up the phone, not to read his text, but to open her contacts. She scrolled past Dom, past Mia, past old racing crew members who were ghosts themselves. She found a number she hadn’t dialed in over a year, labeled simply with a letter: J.
Dr. Jenna Albright had given it to her upon discharge.For emergencies. Or breakthroughs. The quiet, capable voice of her sanity.
Catalina dialed. It rang twice.
“Catalina.” Dr. Albright’s voice was calm, pleasantly surprised. “This is unexpected. Is everything alright?”
Catalina looked out at the sun-dappled street, the pristine, ordinary morning. She took a breath so deep it hurt.
“No,” she said, her voice astonishingly steady. “Something happened. Something… consequential. I need to talk. Not as a patient. As… a person who needs objective advice from someone who knows the context but isn’t in the story.”
A brief, professional pause on the other end. “Of course. My one o’clock cancelled. Can you come to my private office, not the clinic? Say, twelve-thirty?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll text you the address.”
“Thank you.”
She hung up. The first concrete action. It felt like stepping onto a narrow, unknown path. She went inside, leaving the cold coffee on the balcony. She stood in the center of her clean, quiet living room. The silence was different now. It wasn’t empty. It was charged, like the air before a summer storm, thick with a potential that was both terrifying and alive.
She looked down at her stomach again, her hand resting there lightly. No flutter. No sign. Just a fact.
“What have we done?” she whispered to the empty room. This time, it wasn’t a plea. It was the first, raw acknowledgment of a shared creation. A question without an answer, hanging in the fragrant, morning air of a sanctuary that was no longer a refuge, but the first cell of a new, unimaginable world.
The office was in a different part of the city, near the old marina. The building was sleek glass and brushed steel, not the wood and warm colors of the clinic’s garden. The sterile quiet of the lobby felt accusing. Catalina rode the elevator up, watching her own tense reflection in the polished doors.
Dr. Jenna Albright’s private suite smelled of lemongrass and clean paper. The view was all water and sky. The doctor herself was dressed in soft charcoal slacks and a cream blouse, no white coat, her blonde hair in a loose knot. “Catalina,” she said, closing the door. Her eyes, a calm hazel, scanned Catalina’s face. “You look like you haven’t slept.”
“I haven’t,” Catalina said, not moving from her spot near the door. “Not really.”
“Sit. Wherever you like.” Jenna gestured to a deep sofa or one of two armchairs, her movements deliberately slow. Catalina chose a chair, its frame cool and hard through her jeans. She didn’t want comfort. Jenna took the other chair, angled slightly, not opposite. Not a session. But the ghost of one hung between them.
“You said ‘consequential’,” Jenna prompted, her voice gentle but direct.
Catalina’s gaze fixed on a sailboat tilting on the sparkling bay. “I’m pregnant.” She said it to the window. The words landed in the quiet room, stark, factual, demolishing any pretense of a social call.
A beat of silence. Jenna didn’t gasp, didn’t stiffen. She absorbed it. “I see.” Another measured pause. “The garden?”
Catalina finally looked at her. A short, sharp nod. Her throat was tight. “Six weeks.Maybe seven. I did the math.”
Jenna’s expression remained professionally neutral, but a deep, complicated empathy tightened the skin around her eyes. “Okay. Have you spoken to him?”
“No.”
“Your plan?”
“I don’t have one. That’s why I’m here.” Catalina leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands clenched. “I broke the test. I swept it up. I thought about running. I thought about… ending it. I sat on my balcony and none of the doors looked like exits. They all looked like different kinds of prisons.” Her voice cracked. “I am so goddamn tired of being in a prison of my own making.”
“The garden wasn’t just a relapse, Catalina.” Jenna’s tone was clinical now, a diagnostic beam. “It was a culmination. You framed it, in our sessions, as a final, destructive act. But procreation isn’t inherently destructive. It’s… generative. Even when the circumstance is catastrophic.”
“Don’t give me semantics, Jenna.” A flicker of her old fire. “You know what this is. You know who he is.”
“I do.” Jenna didn’t flinch. “That’s the only reason you’re here, in this room, and not a Planned Parenthood or a bus station. You need to contextualize this within the specific pathology of your bond. So let’s do that. Tell me what you feel, physically, right now. Before the fear.”
Catalina closed her eyes. The hum of the building’s HVAC, the distant cry of a gull. The slight, persistent pull in her lower abdomen, a new anchor point in her body. “I feel… aware,” she whispered. “Hyper-aware of my own center. It’s not sickness. It’s not anything yet. It’s just a… presence.”
“And the fear?”
“It’s not for me.” She opened her eyes, and they were glittering with unshed tears. “It’s for it.The kid. What it carries in its blood. What the world will see when it looks at him, or her, and sees his face in miniature. My face. A walking monument to our fuck-up.” A tear traced a hot line down her cheek. She ignored it. “I wanted to mark us. I didn’t want to make a whole new person to bear the mark.”
Jenna nodded slowly. “That is the fundamental, and valid, ethical crisis.” She shifted, crossing her legs. “I am not going to tell you what to do. I am going to ask you the only question that might matter. Can you separate the child from the context of its conception? Not now. Not in five years.But in twenty. Can you imagine loving the person it becomes, independently of the story of its origin?”
The question was a spear. It pierced through the chaos and lodged deep. Catalina saw a phantom child, features blurred, laughing with a sound that was neither Dom’s nor hers. Riding a bike. Asking a question about the stars. The love that rose in response was a brutal, animal instinct, terrifying in its purity. It had nothing to do with gardens or clinics or sins.
“Yes,” she breathed, the word torn from her.
“Then you have your first answer.” Jenna’s voice was softer now. “The practical, monumental challenges remain. But the core emotional possibility is there. That’s your foundation. Now you must decide what to build on it, and who to build it with.”
“He has to know.”
“Do you believe that?”
“He’d burn the world down if he found out from someone else.” Catalina wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “And he… deserves the choice. To step in, or step away. It’s his too.”
“Even if his choice breaks you?”
Catalina gave a hollow, sad laugh. “Everything breaks me. And then I put myself back together. It’s the one thing I’m good at.”
Jenna offered a faint, respectful smile. “Then you have a direction. A terrible, necessary conversation.”
The weight in the room shifted. The immediate, suffocating panic had been dissected, laid out on the table between them. It was still awful. But it had borders now. It was a problem, not a void.
“Thank you,” Catalina said, standing abruptly. She couldn’t process any more. “For not being shocked. For not quoting ethics codes.”
“My job was to help you understand your own mind, Catalina.” Jenna stood as well. “All of it. Even the parts that create new life. Be gentle with yourself. The next steps are the hardest.”
Catalina walked to the door, the marina’s bright light blinding after the dim office. She paused with her hand on the knob. “Jenna? Hypothetically. If I kept it. Is it… would it be wrong?”
The therapist was silent for a long moment. “Biology is not morality,” she said finally, choosing each word with immense care. “The child will not be a sin. It will be a person. Your job, should you choose it, is to ensure that is the only story it ever has to carry. That is a monumental task. But it is not, by definition, a wrong one.”
Catalina nodded, once.It was enough.
Out in the corridor, the elevator doors opened with a soft chime. She stepped inside, her reflection clearer now in the polished brass. Her eyes were redThese next two journeys were separate, but they were hers. She owed him the truth. She owed the silent, dividing cells a future untouched by the dark, possessive gravity of their beginning.
Her phone was a lead weight in her pocket. The text from Dom was still unread. She pulled it out as the elevator descended. Her thumb hovered, then she tapped the screen.
Dom: Thinkin’ about you.Simple. Devastating.
She didn’t reply. She slid the phone back into her pocket, the warmth of her thigh against it. She walked out into the marina’s salt-tinged wind. The sails on the water
She walked out into the marina’s salt-tinged wind. The sails on the water were brilliant, painful slashes of white against the blue. She walked along the dock, the wooden planks firm and resonant under her boots. The solidity of it, the sound, helped. Each step was a decision. She reached the end where the fishing boats rocked, their hulls streaked with salt and rust, smelling of diesel and old fish. She pulled out her phone.
Her thumb found his name in her contacts. The simple, brutal "Dom."She pressed call. It rang. Once.Twice.
"Yeah." His voice was a low rumble, unchanged, filling her ear. It carried the echo of a garage, the hiss of an air gun in the background.
"Hey." Her own voice was thin, stretched. "We need to talk. In person."
Silence for a heartbeat. The air gun stopped."Where?"
"Not your place." Her mind scrabbled for neutral ground, somewhere without the ghosts of Letty or Mia or his tools, somewhere the news wouldn’t stain the walls. "That park. Up on the overlook. The one with the stone benches."Another pause. She could picture him wiping his hands on a rag, his broad face tightening."When?"
"Now. If you can."
"I'm on my way." A click. The connection died.No questions. No protest. He was coming. The finality of it hollowed her out. She stood at the edge of the dock, watching the water slap against the pilings. A knot in her chest, where her new, secret life was taking root, seemed to pulse in time with the waves.
The drive to the overlook was a blur of sun-streaked asphalt and green glimpses of canyon through the passenger window. She parked her silver Subaru beside his black Dodge Charger, its muscular silhouette crouched under a sprawling live oak. He was already there, leaning against the driver’s side door with his arms crossed. He wore a grey t-shirt, oil-smudged across the chest, and jeans. He watched her get out.
"You okay?" he asked, not moving. His eyes scanned her face, missing nothing—the fatigue, the tightness around her mouth.
"No," she said, walking past him toward the low stone wall that bordered the lookout."Not really."
He pushed off the car and followed. The view was a sprawling postcard of the city haze in the distance, canyons folding into each other below. The air up here was cleaner, smelling of dry grass and hot stone. She stopped, her hands gripping the rough, sun-warmed top of the wall. He stood beside her, not touching, a foot of charged space between them. He waited.
She stared at a hawk circling a thermal far below. The words were there, arranged in her head, but her mouth felt numb. "The garden," she started, then stopped. Her knuckles were white against the grey rock.
"What about it." Not a question. A flat prompt.
She turned to face him. The directness of his gaze, so like her own, was almost too much. She couldn’t do this looking at the horizon. She had to see it land. "It had consequences, Dom."
He blinked, once. A slight frown creased his forehead."What consequences."
"I'm pregnant." She said it cleanly, a single, brutal strike. No qualifiers. No softening.
His expression didn't change at first. It simply… shut down. The intensity in his eyes banked, replaced by a kind of hollow processing. His gaze dropped from her face to her stomach, then snapped back up. The silence expanded, filled only by the whisper of the wind through the dry grass. He took a half-step back, as if pushed by an unseen force.
"Six weeks," she added, her voice barely audible over the wind. "Maybe seven. I did the math. It’s from that night. Only from that night."
He turned away from her, his shoulders a solid, tense line. He stared out at the view, one hand coming up to scrub over his shaved head. His breath left him in a slow, controlled stream. "Jesus, Cat." The words were ground out, barely audible."Yeah." A hot pressure built behind her eyes. She fought it, clamping her teeth together.
He spun back, the motion sudden. His face was a mask of conflicted storm. "What are you… what are you going to do?" The question was raw, stripped of all his usual command.
"I don't know!" The words burst from her, louder than she intended, fracturing the quiet. "I’ve thought about every option.They all suck. They all hurt. It’s a life, Dom. It’s a whole goddamn life we made because we couldn't keep our hands off each other in a fucking garden."The dam broke. The tears she’d been holding since the bathroom that morning, since the shattering plastic, spilled over. They weren't delicate. They were hot, angry, shameful tracks down her cheeks. A sob wrenched itself from her throat, ugly and helpless. She covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking.
She heard him move. Then his arms were around her, pulling her into him. He didn't speak. He just held her. The solid wall of his chest, the familiar scent of motor oil and plain soap on his skin, the sheer, undeniable reality of him. She buried her face against his shirt, her fists clenching in the fabric at his sides. She cried for the chaos, for the impossible choice, for the innocent thing growing inside her that would forever link her to this man in a way even the garden hadn't managed.
His hand came up, large and rough, and settled on the back of her head. His chin rested on her crown. He held her as she fell apart against him, in the empty, sunlit silence of the overlook.