Chapter 5: Purchase of Fate
The Charger ate the miles, a black shark in a sea of asphalt. The desert unspooled, unbroken and indifferent. Inside the car, the silence was a physical presence, thick with the things they’d bought at a dusty, forgotten gas station two hours back: bottled water, protein bars, a bag of salty chips for Mina. And three boxes, now hidden at the very bottom of a duffel bag in the trunk, bought with cash from a grim-faced clerk who hadn’t looked up from his racing form.
Catalina hadn’t spoken since the motel. She watched the scrubland blur past, her hand still resting in his on the console. Her fingers were cold. Mina slept in the back, the slow, deep sleep of a child untroubled by borders or bloodlines.
He saw the green exit sign glowing in the twilight: SERVICES. 1/2 MILE. A pictograph of a gas pump, a bed, a fork and knife. And in smaller letters: Pharmacy.
His grip on the wheel tightened. The turn signal clicked, a loud, metronomic beat in the quiet. He felt her head turn toward him, felt the question in the sudden tension of her hand.
“We need gas,” he said, his voice a low rasp from disuse.
She said nothing. She just watched the exit ramp rise to meet them.
The service stop was a sad cluster of buildings under the bruised purple sky: a truck-stop diner with neon Pepsi signs, a self-serve pump island, and a squat, flat-roofed building with a glowing green cross and the words 24-HR RX in peeling letters. The parking lot was vast and mostly empty, potholed asphalt gleaming under the sickly yellow-orange of high-pressure sodium lights. A solitary shopping cart rested on its side against a curb. The wind kicked up, carrying the smell of diesel and fried food.
He pulled up to a pump. “Stay here.”
He got out, the door thudding shut. The air was cooler now, the desert heat leaching away into the vast dome of the coming night. He filled the tank, the numbers on the dial spinning, a testament to their distance from anything that used to be home. He replaced the nozzle, screwed the cap back on. He stood for a moment, his back to the car, hands on his hips, looking at the pharmacy. The fluorescent glow from inside was a cold, clinical invitation.
He turned and walked back to the driver’s window. She had rolled it down. Mina was stirring in the back, making sleepy sounds.
“I’m going in,” he said, his eyes holding hers. They were dark pools, reflecting the parking lot lights. “For… road stuff. Antacids. Aspirin.”
She understood. A tiny, almost imperceptible nod. “Get more wipes. For Mina.”
“Yeah.” He started to turn, then stopped. “You want anything else?”
Her lips pressed into a thin line. She shook her head once, sharply. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the armrest.
He walked across the empty expanse. His boots crunched on loose gravel. Each step felt weighted, deliberate. The automatic doors hissed open, blasting him with air conditioning so cold it felt like walking into a meat locker. The fluorescence was relentless, bleaching the color from everything. Rows of headache remedies, digestive aids, vitamins. The air smelled of antiseptic and burnt coffee from a small machine by the register.
A young guy, maybe nineteen, with acne and a slack jaw, looked up from a magazine behind the counter. He gave Dominic a bored once-over, his gaze lingering on the tight black t-shirt, the muscles, the permanent scowl. This wasn't a guy buying allergy medicine.
Dominic didn’t hesitate. He moved down the aisles with a predatory focus. Family Planning. The words were printed on a little plastic sign. The selection was meager. He grabbed three different boxes. One with a blue digital screen. One with two pink lines. One that promised early results. He didn’t read the details. He just took them.
He grabbed a jumbo pack of baby wipes, a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol, and a bag of sour gummy worms from a display near the register—Mina’s favorite. An absurd, normal thing.
He approached the counter and dumped his haul onto the laminate. The boxes clattered. The cashier’s eyes flicked down, then back up to Dominic’s face. A faint, knowing smirk touched his lips. Dominic met his gaze and held it. The smirk died, replaced by a nervous swallow. The kid scanned the items, his movements suddenly hurried.
“Need a bag?” His voice was higher than before.
“Yeah.”
The kid fumbled with a plastic bag, shoving everything in. The pregnancy test boxes were clearly visible through the thin white plastic. Dominic pulled a wad of cash from his pocket, peeled off two twenties, and tossed them on the counter. He took the bag and turned before the kid could finish counting change.
The doors hissed again. The warm night air was a relief after the sterile chill. He could see the Charger, a dark silhouette under a flickering light. Catalina was staring straight ahead through the windshield.
He got in, threw the bag onto the backseat next to Mina’s car seat. The little girl was fully awake now, rubbing her eyes. “Daddy? Snacks?”
“In the bag, mija,” he said, starting the car. The engine rumbled to life, a sound of power and flight. He pulled out of the lot, back onto the service road, back toward the highway.
They drove for ten minutes in silence before she spoke.
“Which ones did you get?”
He kept his eyes on the road.“Three kinds. I don’t know. The ones they had.”
“Where are they?”
“Backseat. With the wipes and the candy.”
She was quiet again. Then, a sound from the back, the rustle of plastic. Mina said, “Ooh, worms!” Catalina was turned around, one arm over the seat, digging in the bag.
The rustling stopped. She pulled her arm back and faced forward, a single box clutched in her hand. It was the one with the digital screen. She stared at the clinical blue and white packaging as if it were a live wire. The highway lights strobed across her knuckles, white then dark, white then dark.
Mina crunched a gummy worm in the back, oblivious."Good, Daddy."
"You're welcome, baby." His voice was thick. The road ahead was a tunnel of darkness punched through by their high beams. He saw the reflective green sign for a rest area in one mile.
"Get off here," she said quietly, not looking up from the box.
"We just stopped."
"Get off, Dom." Her tone was frayed, a wire about to snap. "I can't wait. I can't drive another two hundred miles wondering if there's a… a thing… inside me. A person."
He didn't argue. He signaled and took the exit, the tires humming over the ramp's textured surface. The rest area was a crescent of pavement hugging a concrete block building with dimly lit restrooms.No other cars. He parked at the farthest edge, the Charger facing the wall of scrub and night. He killed the engine. The sudden silence was a vacuum, filled only by the electric buzz of a distant security light and Mina’s contented chewing.
Catalina just sat there, holding the box. He watched her thumb trace the edge of the plastic clamshell.
"You want me to come in?" The question felt inadequate, stupid.
She shook her head. "Stay with her." She finally looked at him, her eyes wide and glassy in the dashboard’s faint glow. "What if it is?"
He had no answer that wouldn't sound like a lie or a confession. He reached out, covered the hand holding the box. His skin was warm, hers was ice. "Then we know."
A single tear escaped, tracking a clean line through the dust on her cheek. She wiped it angrily with her free hand, shoved the door open, and got out. The dome light was a brief, shocking flare in the darkness. Then the door slammed, plunging them back into shadow.
She walked toward the women's restroom, her steps quick and rigid, the box held close to her chest. The heavy door swung shut behind her with a solid, final thump.
Dominic sagged against his seat, a wave of exhaustion hitting him so hard his vision blurred for a second. He ran his hands over his face, pressing his palms into his eye sockets. The scent of her, of their mingled sweat from the motel room, still clung faintly to his skin. It felt like a brand now. A harbinger.
"Daddy?" Mina's voice was small in the back. "Where Mama go?"
"She’ll be right back, mija." He twisted in his seat to look at her. She had gummy worm sugar smeared around her mouth. "You okay?"
"My dinosaur is sleeping." She held up the stuffed toy, tucking it under her chin."Good. You should sleep too."
"Mama’s sad."
His breath caught. "Why do you say that, baby?"
"She was crying.I saw." Mina said it simply, a statement of fact. "In the car, before."
The kid saw everything. He forced a smile he knew she couldn't fully see. "Grown-ups get sad sometimes too. It's okay."
"Is it 'cause we left home?"
"Yeah, mija. It's 'cause we left home."
Inside the cinderblock bathroom, the air was stale and thick with chemical cleaner. A fluorescent tube flickered and buzzed overhead, casting a sickly, vibrating light. Catalina locked herself in the larger accessible stall, her back against the cold metal door. Her heart was a frantic animal trying to batter its way out of her ribs.
She ripped the box open with trembling fingers. The plastic felt cheap and sharp. The instructions were a blur of diagrams and tiny text. Pee on the stick. Wait three minutes. A plus sign or a minus sign. Pregnant or Not Pregnant. As if it were that simple. As if those words could capture the cataclysm this little piece of plastic might confirm.
She fumbled with her shorts, sank onto the toilet. Her hands shook so badly she almost dropped the test. She managed it, set the plastic cap back on, and laid it on the edge of the sink. The three-minute timer on her phone was an unbearable countdown to a verdict. She couldn't look. She stood, pulled her clothes up, and paced the small space—two steps, turn, two steps.
She thought of the frantic, breaking moment against the motel wall. The absolute lack of thought. The sheer, physical need that had annihilated every barrier. She thought of Mina, asleep next door, innocent of the sin that had made her. She thought of Dom’s face afterward, that shattered, possessive look. The way he'd said we can't be happening with his body still thrumming inside hers.
The timer chimed. The sound was obscenely cheerful in the grim silence.
She froze mid-step. Her breath fogged slightly in the cold, recycled air. She forced herself to turn, to look at the white stick resting on the chipped porcelain.
The digital screen was lit. One word, in crisp, unwavering blue letters.
PREGNANT.
The world didn't end. The lights didn't flicker out. The cinderblock walls didn't crumble. That was the worst part. Nothing changed except the universe had now officially confirmed her deepest, most terrifying gut feeling. She stared at the word until the letters lost meaning, became just shapes, a cruel abstract design.
She picked up the test. The plastic was cool. She turned it over, as if the back might offer different news. It didn't. She dropped it into the small metal trash can. It landed with a soft, plastic tink. She washed her hands mechanically, watching the water run over her skin. She looked at her reflection in the metal-framed mirror. Her own face, pale under the buzzing light, looked back—a stranger who was now, unquestionably, carrying her twin brother’s child.
A numb, icy clarity settled over her. The frantic fear was still there, a frozen lake with currents of panic swirling beneath, but on the surface, she was steady. She splashed water on her face, smoothed her hair back. She had to walk back to the car. She had to tell him.
She pushed the heavy door open. The night air was a physical shock, warm and alive compared to the tomb-like bathroom. She saw the outline of the Charger, a low, dark shape against the greater dark. He was standing outside it now, leaning against the driver’s door, a cut silhouette looking her way. Mina was a small shape in the backseat, likely asleep again.
He straightened as she approached. He didn't say a word. He just searched her face in the dim light, his own expression carved from stone, waiting for the impact.
She stopped a few feet from him. The security light above them buzzed like an angry insect. She opened her mouth. No sound came out. She swallowed, tried again.
"It's positive." Her voice was flat, dead air.
He didn't react. Not at first. His gaze dropped from her eyes to her stomach, then back up. A muscle in his jaw clenched, a tiny, violent spasm. He looked away, out into the black desert, his hands curling into fists at his sides. He took a long, slow breath that hitched at the end.
"Okay," he finally said. The word was a rock dropped into a well. It meant nothing and everything.
"What's okay?" she whispered, the numbness cracking, a flare of anger igniting. "What part of this is okay, Dom?"
"None of it." He looked back at her, his eyes full of a raw, unvarnished torment. "But it is. It's happening. So we deal."
"How?" The word was a plea ripped from her chest. "Another motel room? Another state? Another lie on a birth certificate? This isn't a car we can rebuild! This is a person!"
"Then we raise it!" His voice rose, a low crack of thunder in the empty lot, then he instantly lowered it, a pained glance toward the car. "We raise them both. Mina. And this one. As best we can.Together."
"Together doing what? Living as what? We can't be a family. Not a real one. We’ll be fugitives from the law and from… from normal." She wrapped her arms around herself, holding her own stomach as if she could already feel it changing. "This baby… it's proof, Dom. It's biological proof of what we are. What we did."
"I know what it is!" The frustration and fear burst out of him, harsh and guttural. "You think I don't? You think I wanted this? For you? For… for a kid?" He stepped closer, his face inches from hers. The air between them crackled with shared desperation. "But I can't change it. I can only do one thing, Cat. I can only keep you.Keep you both. All of you. However I have to. However messed up it looks."
His words hung there, a vow and a prison sentence all at once. He wasn't talking about love. He was talking about survival. A brutal, possessive, elemental need to protect what was his, no matter the cost, no matter the shape of it.
She stared up at him, seeing the boy she’d grown up with, the man she’d ached for, the father of her children, the source of her ruin and her only tether to life. All of it, twisted together in a single, tortured man.
He reached out then, not to grab her, but to place his broad, calloused hand over her own where it rested on her stomach. The warmth of it seared through her shirt. It was a claim, silent and absolute.
From the car, a sleepy whimper. "Mama?"
She pulled her hand away from his, the spell broken. "We need to drive," she said, her voice drained. "We need to find a real place to sleep. Somewhere… somewhere for a few days."
He nodded, the practical Dom resurfacing. "We'll find something. Off the main roads."
She walked around to the passenger side. She didn't look back at the restroom, at the little metal trash can holding the evidence. As she slid into the seat, she glanced at the back. Mina was watching her, eyes heavy with sleep but aware.
"You okay, Mama?"
"I'm okay, sweetie." Catalina reached back, her fingers finding Mina's small, sticky hand. She held on.
Dominic got in, started the car. The engine’s growl was a promise of momentum, of forward motion, even if the destination was more uncertain than ever. He pulled out of the rest area, accelerating back onto the empty highway. The darkness swallowed them.
He reached across the console again. This time, his hand found not hers, but rested gently on her knee. A point of contact. A grounding wire in the chaotic storm of their reality. She didn't move it.
She looked out the window at the blur of night. Her free hand drifted to her stomach, resting there, a silent, terrified greeting to the new life taking root in the wreckage. The road ahead was endless, black, and unknown. They were carrying more than secrets now. They were carrying a future, one that was already defying every rule of the world. All they could do was drive toward it.
All they could do was drive toward it.
The white dashes of the highway hypnotized her. Three positive tests, shoved in a trash can in a fluorescent hellscape. Her body felt foreign, a vessel for a conspiracy. Dom’s hand was a warm, heavy weight on her knee, a grounding point in the freefall. He hadn't moved it in fifty miles.
“Where’s our new house gonna be?” Mina’s voice, bright with sleep-fog, cut the silence.
Dominic’s thumb moved slightly against Catalina’s leg. “Don’t know yet, mija,” he said, his voice carefully measured. “Somewhere quiet. Somewhere with stars.”
“Like Grandma’s?” Mina pressed. “With the big yard?”
Catalina’s throat tightened. Their grandmother’s place in San Diego was rubble in their rearview, along with every other recognizable landmark of a normal life. “Maybe not a yard right away, baby,” she managed, forcing lightness. “But we’ll find someplace good.”
“Will my new room be green?” The questions were coming faster, a child’s attempt to construct a future from thin air. “Can we get a dog?”
“We’ll see about a dog,” Dom answered, taking the practical route. “Focus on the dinosaur for now.”
Mona was quiet for a moment, the only sound the tires eating asphalt. Then, “Is the baby in your tummy gonna have a green room, Mama?”
The air in the Charger vanished. Catalina felt Dominic’s hand clamp down, a reflexive spasm of shock. Her own breath hitched, trapped in her lungs. The dashboard lights painted faint ghosts on the windshield. How long had she been awake? Had she heard them at the rest area, seen the box, understood the quiet, frantic chaos?
“What baby, sweetie?” Catalina asked, turning slowly to look into the back. Mina’s face was a pale oval in the dark, her eyes wide and earnest.
“The one you and Daddy were talking about.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. “You said ‘this baby.’ To Daddy. Outside the potty place.”
Catalina met Dominic’s gaze across the console. His expression was carved from granite, but his eyes held a flicker of pure panic. They’d been careless, standing in the buzzing light, thinking she was asleep.
“It’s… it’s a maybe, Mina,” Catalina said, the lie tasting like ash. Her hand instinctively curled over her stomach. “Sometimes grown-ups think about maybe having another baby.”
“But you are,” Mina corrected with the brutal logic of a three-year-old. “I heard. You said ‘it’s a person.’” She tilted her head. “Is it a brother? I want a brother. We can name him Rex, like the dinosaur.”
Dominic let out a long, controlled breath. “It’s way too early to know that, mija.” He used his ‘final word’ tone, the one that usually ended discussions.
It didn’t work. “How did it get in there?”
Catalina closed her eyes. Dom’s grip on her knee was vise-tight now. This was the cliff they’d been hurtling toward, the one they’d never mapped an escape from.
“That’s… a grown-up thing, baby,” Catalina whispered, her voice fraying. “A special kind of hug.”
“A secret hug?”
“Yeah,” Dom said, the word a rough scrape. “A secret hug.”
Mina seemed to consider this, digesting the information. The next question landed like a gut punch. “Are you and Daddy gonna get married now? My friend Chloe’s mom had a baby and then they got married in a church.”
The sheer, innocent normalcy of the question was the most horrifying part. It outlined the perfect, unattainable shape of the life they could never have.A wedding. A church. A public acknowledgement. All of it was a closed road, barricaded and mined.
“It’s different for us, Mina,” Catalina said, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. She needed to steer this, to build some wall a three-year-old would accept. “Our family is just us. Me, you, Daddy. And the maybe-baby. We don’t need a church. We have the car.”
“The car is our church,” Dom said suddenly, his voice low and intense, echoing something their own father had said a lifetime ago about the garage. He was reaching for any anchor, any piece of their real, messy history to make this seem less broken.
Mina was quiet, seemingly satisfied with this theology. She hugged her dinosaur.“Okay. But can the baby ride in the car with us? Where will its car seat go?”
The tension broke, shifting from existential terror to simple logistics. Catalina almost laughed, a wet, choked sound. “We’ll figure out the car seat, I promise.”
“Good.” Mina yawned, the interrogation apparently over. “I’m tired of driving.”
“Sleep, then,” Dom said, his voice softening a fraction. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
Within minutes, her breathing evened out into the deep rhythm of sleep. The charged silence returned, but it was different now. Their secret wasn’t just between them anymore. It was in the backseat, metabolized by a child who accepted it without understanding its weight.
Dominic slowly removed his hand from Catalina’s knee. He flexed his fingers, the joints cracking in the quiet. “We need a plan,” he said, not looking at her. “A real one. Not just the next tank of gas.”
“The plan just got more complicated,” she whispered, staring at her own reflection in the window. Her hand still rested on her stomach. A secret hug. The phrase was going to haunt her.
“Everything’s complicated.” He glanced at the GPS screen, its glow painting his profile in faint blue. “We find a town. Small. We rent something for a month. Cash. You see a doctor. We need to know… everything.”
The clinical edge in his voice was a defense mechanism. He was treating it like an engine problem—diagnose, assess, repair. But there was no repair for this.
“And then what?” she asked, turning to face him. The green light from the dashboard illuminated the exhaustion in his eyes, the stubborn set of his jaw. “We just… live there? With a newborn? What do we become, Dom? The weird new family that keeps to themselves? The ones people whisper about?”
“Let them whisper.” His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “They won’t know why. They’ll just think we’re… off. They can think whatever they want.”
“And Mina? She starts school. She makes friends. She tells them about her baby brother Rex, and how her parents are twins, and how we drive all night sometimes.” Catalina’s voice rose, trembling. “Kids repeat everything. It’s a house of cards. One curious teacher, one social worker doing a home visit…”
“Then we homeschool.” The solution was immediate, radical, and utterly Dom. “We keep our circle tight. We control what gets out.”
“You want to lock her in a house?” The image was suffocating. “Lock us in a house? With this… thing between us just sitting there, every day?”
“It’s not a thing!” he snapped, the control finally splintering. He shot a glance at the sleeping Mina, lowered his voice to a savage whisper. “It’s a baby. My baby. Our baby. And I will build a goddamn fortress around it if that’s what it takes. Around all of you. I don’t care if it’s a prison. It’ll be safe. It’ll be ours.”
His declaration hung in the air, a brutal, loving manifesto. He wasn’t offering happiness. He was offering survival within walls of his own making. It was the only currency he had.
Catalina looked away, out into the consuming dark. The headlights caught a road sign: NEXT SERVICES 32 MILES. She felt unmoored, floating in a vast, black sea with only his desperate, adamant will as a North Star. It was a direction, at least. A terrible, certain direction.
“Okay,” she said, the fight leaving her, replaced by a deep, cellular fatigue. “Okay. We find a town. We build a fortress.”
He nodded once, a sharp, decisive cut. The decision was made. The road ahead was no longer just blacktop. It was a path to a hidden, walled-off life they would have to invent from nothing. She leaned her head against the cold window, her palm a silent, speaking pressure on the future growing inside her. The fortress, she knew, would be built around a truth more volatile than any secret they’d ever kept. Mina’s voice echoed in her mind, a pure, simple sound in the roar of the engine.
Is it a brother?
They drove on.