Free Snowbound Halloween by Veronica Tower

Chapter One
     
    Thea Clarke watched the two pink lines appear on the pregnancy test with a feeling of dread hardening in her stomach. How could it be positive? She’d only missed her pill a couple of times this month. How could the test be positive?
    Her knees felt weak so she let herself sink down onto the toilet seat, still staring at the two pink lines on the little stick. What was she going to do? She and her boyfriend, Nick Morrow, weren’t even living with each other yet.
    They’d been dating less than a year and she really didn’t know how he was going to react to this. Even if her substantially younger boyfriend didn’t panic… Even if he somehow crazily decided he wanted Thea to move in with him and maybe get married, what was she going to do about Mom? The old woman would lose her house without Thea taking care of the ungrateful thing. Mom hated Nick because he owned and operated a bar and she was completely opposed to the consumption of any alcoholic beverages. At least she didn’t seem to have a problem with Nick being white.
    What was she going to do? She couldn’t even count on her sister, Becka, to help. Becka had spent most of the last year guilt-tripping Thea into staying with their mother because she was far too selfish to take care of the old woman herself.
    “Oh, God, Mom!” she whispered, fear screeching cacophonously inside her head. How was she ever going to tell Mom? It was going to be even worse than telling Nick. He might be scared off, but at least he wasn’t going to yell at her over this or make her feel like a whore who’d been selling herself on street corners. She’d been a thirty-eight year old virgin when she’d started going out with Nick after meeting him at his New Year’s Eve party last year. How could she have been so damn careless? What was she going to do with a child?
    As if the devil could hear Thea’s concerns, her mother chose that moment to knock on the bathroom door. “Thea, you’ve been in there an awfully long time. Is everything all right?”
    No, it’s not all right! Thea wanted to scream at her. I’m pregnant, damn it, and I’m not ready for a child. But confessing to her mother right now was guaranteed to make everything worse.
    She tried to buy herself some time to pull herself together with a little lie. “Yes, Mom, I’m okay. I’m just having a little stomach trouble. I’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”
    “All right then,” her mother said in a voice that sounded highly skeptical to Thea. What the hell did the old woman think she was doing in here? Masturbating? Like Mom had ever given her enough privacy to engage in something like that.
    Thea forced herself to get moving and protect herself. She gathered up the pieces of evidence—the stick, the plastic wrapper, and the instruction sheet—and stuck them back in the pregnancy test box. All the while, her mind kept spinning, trying to figure out what she was going to do.
    She’d been against abortion her entire life but for a horrifying moment she considered getting one. She’d been making a lot of extra money at Nick’s bar, especially now that she could bartend as well as waitress at The Church Key. She could probably afford the procedure, but deep in her heart she knew abortion wasn’t an acceptable answer for her. Not only did she firmly believe it was wrong, but she was thirty-eight years old. She may not be ready to have a child right now, but neither did she want to give up what might be her only chance at motherhood. There was no way to tell if she would ever get another chance.
    But if she kept the child, what was she going to do? How was she going to raise a baby on her own?
    Thea needed to talk to someone—figure out her options and decide what she was going to tell Nick! But whom could she trust with a secret like this? Her sister, Becka, certainly wasn’t an option. When God was making babies and handing out portions of good stuff like sympathy and compassion , Becka had