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The nausea had come back that morning, just as it had every morning for the past eleven days.
Hana knew it with the quiet precision that belongs to people who work with other people’s bodies, she knew how to count symptoms, recognize them, catalogue them with the same professional detachment she used when changing IV bags and reading medical charts. She was a nurse. She knew.
That was why she had waited eleven days before buying the test.
Because knowing means you can no longer pretend.
She took it at six-forty in the morning, in the bathroom of her studio apartment, beneath the harsh white glow of a fluorescent light that washed the color from her face. Pale even on her best days, that translucent skin Dabi called “moonlight” when he was in a good mood and “ghost” when he wanted to tease her, she looked like something less than human in that moment. Something almost transparent. As if the light passed straight through her.
She placed the test on the edge of the sink and sat on the floor, her back against the cold bathtub, knees drawn to her chest. She stared at the tiles.
Forty-six white tiles. Four gray. One cracked in the bottom-left corner.
She knew them by heart.
She counted.
She waited.
The timer on her phone went off.
She didn’t move right away.
If I don’t look, it isn’t real yet.
Then she stood.
Two lines.
Clear. Unequivocal. Without even the kindness of uncertainty.
Hana stared at them for a length of time she couldn’t measure. The white light. The silence of the loft at six-fifty in the morning. The distant sounds of the city waking up, unaware that her world had just tilted onto a new and irreversible axis.
Then she set the test down carefully, as though it were fragile.
She braced herself against the sink and looked at her reflection.
Her dark hair fell loose around her shoulders, she had let it down before bed and hadn’t tied it back yet and the green eyes staring back at her from the mirror looked like someone else’s.
A woman she didn’t entirely recognize.
A woman waiting for something now, and not knowing what.
She didn’t cry.
Not right away.
For several minutes she simply stood in the middle of the loft, her robe wrapped tightly around her body, bare feet against the parquet floor that creaked softly beneath her weight.
The apartment was small. She had built an entire life inside it: shelves crowded with plants, soft blankets draped over the couch, a kitchen where the spices were arranged alphabetically because that was who she was because small forms of control compensated for the larger kind she had never truly possessed.
But now the space felt different.
Temporary.
As though she were looking at something that was already beginning to change.
A child.
The word was enormous.
It didn’t fit inside her thoughts yet. It bounced around inside her like something too large for the room it was trying to occupy.
Hana Yamada. Twenty-seven years old. Nurse. Rented studio apartment. No family nearby.
And—
Dabi.
His name crossed her chest like an electric current.
He didn’t know.
Nobody knew.
She herself was only learning it now, in this exact moment, her hands trembling only because she was clasping them together so tightly her knuckles had turned white.
Dabi.
Who laughed, really laughed, with her, in that full, unguarded way that always seemed to surprise him, as if he never expected himself to still be capable of it.
Who searched for her hand in the dark without asking, without explaining, and trusted that she would understand.
Who fell asleep on her couch with absolute certainty, as though it were the only place in the world where he could lower his guard.
Maybe it was.
Dabi, who was a villain.
Dabi, whose hands were covered in scars and whose eyes had seen things she never wanted to imagine.
Dabi, who destroyed things, who burned things, who fought in a war she didn’t fully understand and didn’t want to understand, because understanding it would mean asking questions she wasn’t ready to ask.
For herself, that had been enough.
She knew that.
She had accepted it alone, in silence, on the day she stopped pretending to herself that they were only temporary.
She loved him.
She loved him with the part of herself that didn’t ask for explanations and didn’t build defenses, the childlike, irrational part that was absolutely certain.
But a child.
Hana sat down slowly on the edge of the bed, as though her legs no longer trusted themselves to hold her.
A child doesn’t choose.
A child doesn’t sign any silent contract with reality.
A child arrives in the world without knowing what kind of world it is entering, and someone has to keep them safe, someone has to be enough, has to be stable, has to stay.
She could do that.
Maybe.
But him?
The question wasn’t an accusation.
It wasn’t anger.
It was simply fear.
A cold, vertical fear with nothing melodramatic about it and everything real.
The fear of someone looking ahead and seeing a road split in two, unable to tell which path is right or whether there even is a right one or whether both roads lead somewhere painful.
Outside, the city was waking up.
A tram rattling by.
A distant voice.
The ordinary sounds of a Tuesday morning continuing on without her, indifferent.
Hana remained seated.
She didn’t call anyone.
She didn’t send a message.
She held the secret inside herself the way one holds something precious and terrifying at the same time… tightly, silently, without yet knowing what to do with it.
Now I know, she thought.
And I can never unknow it.
The test was still sitting on the edge of the sink.
Two lines.
Hana didn’t go back to look at it.
She didn’t need to.
She already knew.