“He won’t get away with this,” her grandmother had said privately to Violet, Nina’s mother, once the couple had left.
Five months later, days before Nina had arrived back in New York, Eric had found the girl lying in the bathroom of their apartment, both wrists slit to her elbows. This after months—no, years—of harassment and embarrassment, courtesy of the de Vries family and their friends. So the rumors went.
Nina had never needed her cousin more than she did now. For, truthfully, she had never been more terrified of her own kin. Of what they were capable of.
But Eric was gone, done with the lot of them.
She couldn’t blame him.
But she did wish he were here.
“Oh, no, thank you,” Nina said, pulling away from the man’s warm, if slightly greasy touch. “I know where I’m going.”
“Well, try not to get run over, honey,” he replied with a cheeky grin, then disappeared underground with his box of limes.
“Yes,” Nina murmured. “I’ll try.”
Pulling her cap farther over her face, Nina turned around, looking at the street signs to get her bearings. The corner was overwhelmingly green—not from plants, but from the green iron castings of the elevated train tracks and the green-painted entrance to the Roosevelt Street subway station, which spanned nearly the entire block. It took her a moment to figure out where she was—she didn’t dare bring out her phone. Most people in this neighborhood didn’t seem to have iPhones yet. Nina didn’t want to bring attention to herself, if at all possible.
She crossed the street, sidestepping cabs and people, and all the other forms of life here in Queens. She turned a corner and made her way down a quieter street, grateful that her hat shaded her face from the suddenly glaring sun.
One block, two. And then, there it was. The address on the slip of paper. A nondescript brick building with graffiti on the bottom and a simple glass door marking the clinic’s entrance.
God, was she really here? Her of all people? Standing in front of this grungy building?
Nina wasn’t stupid. She had taken enough history and women’s studies classes to know exactly how common abortion was. Women had been trying to figure out how not to carry unwanted children since the beginning of civilization. What made her any different?
But that was the problem in a nutshell. Was this child really unwanted?
No.
Nina’s vision blurred with sudden tears. This had been happening more and more over the last few weeks. Pregnancy hormones, according to the internet, meant a lot of uncharacteristic crying along with sensitive nipples, morning sickness, and general all-over puffiness. She had told Grandmother she’d picked up a parasite in Italy, and the old woman seemed to believe her. For now.
Nina turned suddenly and tripped over a large crack in the sidewalk.
“Shit,” she muttered as she pulled herself upright, leaning against the crumbling brick. The word felt strange in her mouth—Nina never swore, following her grandmother’s edicts to a T. “Oh, damn.”
She stared at her heel, which had broken clean off. Even in jeans, even in a cap, Nina hadn’t completely been able to eschew her clothes completely. With an extra three inches that made her taller than most men in the city, heels made her feel powerful. Even ones like these, purchased at the same ninety-nine-cent store as her hat.
She could just hear Grandmother now: “Cheap is as cheap does. We get what we pay for, my girl, do we not?”
“Nina?”
Nina’s head jerked around in a panic, though her vision was still blurred with tears she now swiped at viciously.
“Nina Astor, is that really you?”
As he approached, the stranger became slightly familiar, but his name eluded her. In all honesty, the man himself wasn’t particularly memorable. Everything about him was average. In heels, she topped his height by several inches, which meant he was likely no more than five foot six, five-seven at most. His light brown hair was thinning at the temples, cut slightly too long so a few thin strands waved in the hot summer breeze. His body, clothed in a poorly fitted beige suit, had the sagging look of a man who spent too much time behind a desk and not enough at the gym.
But it was his face that was most mediocre of all. Nina thought of the one drawing class she had taken as part of her art history major. They had learned about the composition of bone structure, how to identify the lines in a face that gave a