This Is How Families Are Made

People under pressure act differently. Some are like steel, flexing under the load, adapting. Others are like concrete, able to bear immense burdens until they suddenly crumble. Others are like wood, twisting and splintering under stress. Reya Arnaud looked down at her test results and shattered like glass.

She gripped the edge of the kitchen benchtop with white knuckles as she felt it, that telltale in her stomach, and bolted for the sink. She heaved, her body shuddering, coughing, and after it had subsided, she ran the water to wash it all away and rinsed her mouth. When the worst of it had passed, she put the kettle on to boil, putting toast into the toaster, and made Matt breakfast in bed because it was Sunday.

Reya smoothed her dark hair back with her fingers, trying to get a grip on the empty feeling inside. By the time she had breakfast on the tray, it was like none of it had ever happened.

"You up?" she called out as she entered the bedroom.

"Define up," a male voice replied.

"Up, as in awake, Matt. Not the other up," she murmured.

"I'm up," Matt replied, "And also up."

Raya swept into the room and approached the bed. She glanced down over the bare chest of the man propped up in the bed, down to the carefully arranged folds of the sheets over his crotch. Reya laid the tray on his lap and he winced, shifting his hips.

"Sorry, did I catch it?"

"You're gonna catch it, Rey."

"It shouldn't have gotten itself in the way."

She perched on the edge of the bed and gave him a peck on the lips.

"Not eating?" he enquired.

"Going for a run."

He looked up at her, his hand touching her bare knee. Gradually, it advanced up her leg, his fingers sliding around to the inside of her thigh, disappearing under her nightshirt. Reya stood up.

"Eat the toast. I'll be back in half an hour."

Matt made a face. "I can wait," he said. "Just toast?"

"Yeah, babe. Don't want you getting flabby."

"You talk about bacon like it's a sin."

"You talk about sin like it's bacon."

Reya went to her drawers, pulling out her exercise-wear. She stripped off her nightdress, turning her back to him, feeling his eyes on her bare body.

"You enjoying the show?" she muttered over her shoulder as she pulled the exercise bra over her head.

"Come here and I'll give you a review."

"I can already guess."

She bent over, aware of how it would present her body to him: the soft curve of her rear, her legs slightly parted showing the gap between. She threaded her feet through her lilac exercise tights and pulled them up her trim legs, hiding her bottom from view. She stood upright, smoothing her hands over the fabric, and glanced back at the bed.

"Half an hour," Matt said.

"Yeah, I reckon."

"Okay. Don't be late."

Reya left him in bed munching his toast, and stepped out of the front door of their little house into the fresh, crisp air of a beautiful spring morning. She turned down the street, breaking into a light jog until she had to stop at the corner, her hand on her tummy. It was too much, so she walked instead.

The weight settled down on her gradually. Usually, getting out first thing in the morning was her reset switch, clearing her head for the day, but not this time. She'd suspected something, but actually getting up the guts to check had been hard. She'd procrastinated for days. Then, after the decision was made, resolving not to tell Matt anything about it, bearing that gap between deciding to find out and actually having the results, had been hell. She'd taken that burden on alone. It wouldn't make any difference to the outcome if Matt knew, and if the test had come back clear, he would have been none the wiser, and he wouldn't have had to suffer the agony of the wait.

In the cold light of morning, after the fact, she could see it for the smoke and mirrors that it was. Confronted with the truth, Matt would have to know and their cozy life together would suddenly be a lot harder. She completed a slow circuit of the neighbourhood without coming to a resolution, thankful of one small mercy: she hadn't bumped into anyone she knew.

Back home, Reya peeled off her clothes in the bathroom and set the shower water running. She felt a little better now after getting out of the house, no longer like her body had turned traitor on her. It made it easier to pretend that this was just a Sunday with Matt, the same as all the Sundays since they'd moved in together, years and years ago. As she stepped into the steaming torrent, she heard the door open.

"Room for two?" Matt asked.

"Seriously?"

"Your fault. Your little reverse striptease highlighted an issue."

She turned to him, soapy water frothing over her bare chest. She didn't hide herself from him; Matt stared at her in a way that made her shiver. She said nothing as he slid his sleep shorts down his toned legs, stripping himself naked in front of her. He opened the shower door without being invited and stepped in.

"Want me to do your back?" he murmured, standing close to her in the torrent, the water cascading in rivulets over his body.

Matt had changed over the years, getting thicker without getting stout, layers of muscle on top of the lean frame of the young man she'd first seen at the meet-up in the café a decade and a half ago. He followed her gaze, looking down at himself.

"Not bad for someone halfway to forty," he grinned.

"Because I regulate your bacon intake. Also, halfway to forty would be twenty. You meant nearer forty than thirty, or does adding up baffle you?"

Reya could hear the snarky tone in her voice, part of her peeved at the way he'd just decided to invade the sanctuary of her shower. She still felt weighed down and unwilling to face him.

She looked up into his eyes, about to rebuke him, but then he kissed her and just like that the burden lifted.

"You left me with blue balls," he grumbled.

Her hand slid down his body, reaching between his legs to fondle his sack. Matt grunted in surprise as she squeezed gently.

"You going to pop?" she replied.

She felt him stiffening and knew what was going to happen next. He pressed against her, and she felt his erection poking her belly, allowing herself to be pushed back against the cold tiles. She spread her feet and Matt bent his knees, angling expertly, his tip pressing against her entrance. Reya kissed him deeply and he entered her.

They made unhurried love, his hands cupping her rear, supporting her on tiptoes as he drove himself into her. Reya wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him deeply, enjoying the sensation of being filled by the man she loved. The test and all its implications seemed a million miles away: it was just the two of them, like it had always been, alone together.

Reya's lips parted, making little high-pitched noises as Matt began to increase his tempo, driving harder into her. She felt her own fire, fueled by seeing the passion in his eyes, his lust for her body. She rose to the edge and broke through all at once, climaxing on his cock as he plunged deeply into her and twitched, filling her with his seed, and nothing else mattered.

Reya clung to him, burying her face in his neck, her breathing laboured, feeling every movement of his body, trying to lose herself in it, resisting the world intruding in. When he finally slipped out of her, she felt the hollowness return, but she smiled up at him and kissed him again and he didn't see it.

---

Reya called the Monday all-hands meeting to order, and they all began to go around the room with their status updates and plans for the week. The not-for-profit family assistance agency wasn't large and the updates were over quickly. She made notes, then dispersed the team and sat down at her desk to check through her inbox. Mah came by at ten, as usual.

"Coffee time?" she asked, smiling at Reya brightly. "Ducks all in a row?"

Reya glanced at her schedule and then pushed herself up from her chair.

"Sure, let's go," she replied.

Mah walked her out of the building, bubbling away about her weekend catching up with family. Mah had a large family, three kids all now finally in school, so she was able to get out to work and mix with adults again after a decade of being either barefoot or pregnant or both, as she'd described it. She had a big family, living in a huge house in the outer suburbs with her husband's parents in the back, bedrooms filled with her own children and then a private sanctuary of calm on the top floor for herself and her husband. Whenever Reya and Matt had gone over to visit, the house had been filled invariably with the aroma of Balinese cooking and screaming children.

Reya knew how much the job meant to her, more than having a modest second income to prop up the family finances. One night out at drinks, after a second bottle of wine, Mah had confessed why she wanted to come to work every morning and the revelation, coupled with the surplus of Chardonnay, had brought Reya unexpectedly to tears.

Mah had revealed that she was the black sheep of her family, emigrating from Bali in her twenties, joining a diaspora that scattered across the world in search of better work, settling at last with a man from her original hometown in a country half a planet away from where they grew up. She knew all about the burden of separation from loved ones. She had come to work for Reya almost out of necessity, as if repaying a debt.

Reya had worked her way up, stepping into her retiring boss's shoes at the age of thirty, suddenly facing the reality of running a not-for-profit containing a wide variety of personalities. Mah had called it herding cats, but cats with a calling.

Mah was right, it was a calling: Reya felt it too. She ran an organisation born from tragedies and unlucky circumstances, families split apart, children adopted out. Their job was to help those children, or the adults they became, reconnect with their siblings or with their parents. People like Mah and Iris, the veteran who had intimidated Reya so much when she'd first joined, had acquired a skillset that let them slip through the walls of the bureaucracies that governed their world. Between the two of them, and their nurtured web of contacts, it seemed that they could find anyone.

But Reya's job was to temper all that, taking the dossier and rendering it down to a simple choice for all parties concerned: whether they wanted to initiate contact with each other. Finding a father who had been missing for thirty years often brought joy, but it sometimes brought misery. Reya knew all about that, and so did Matt.

"How's your biodad?" Mah asked as they walked back to the office, coffees in hand.

Reya shrugged. "Same. Not my issue really. His kids are there to look after him."

Mah was doing it again, just checking in, showing that she cared. Her mothering instinct was strong; it was what made her so good at her job.

Reya's first interaction with the agency had been as a customer. She'd walked through the doors with a copy of her birth certificate and sat down in meeting room two and cried her heart out. She'd been seventeen, leaving her adoptive parents behind in the car while she gave her details to the man opposite her. Mr. Purvis had been in charge back then, and he'd done a thorough job, using the channels available to track down her biological parents. He'd summoned her back into the agency a few months later, and asked if she wanted anyone else present while her gave her the results of their research. She had declined.

Mr. Purvis had laid it all out for her, the intervention that had seen her removed from her mother's house a few weeks after her fourth birthday. They had photographed her bruises, logging it all in the report that the man on the other side of the table was reading from. He'd paused then, and gone quiet for a moment, his eyes on the pictures. In the end, she had walked out into the sunshine, to where her mother sat in the car, with two things: her biodad's address and her biological mother's death certificate. It turned out that she had finally managed to drink herself to death, and her father, the man she didn't even remember, who had left when she was a baby, had agreed to be contacted. But that was it, just agreed, no meeting arranged. He was living in the next city, having started again with a family of his own and three kids a decade younger than her.

Mr. Purvis had done one extra thing. He had introduced her to a community group of people like her. Reya had stalled for weeks before finally going along, dreading it, but had walked away at the end of the meeting feeling that her burden had shifted.

They called themselves Young Orphans, even though most of them, like Reya, came from loving adoptive families, drawn together by the same common thread of wanting to work out their place in the world. Some of the members came in from foster care, and each of their stories were different, and often sad. That had been the first time she'd seen Matt.

He was two years older, and easy to talk to. They just seemed to click. He laughed at her jokes, as in, really properly laughed, like he got it. They opened up about their backgrounds little by little: a distant father, an abusive mother, becoming wards of the state at four and six respectively. When she turned eighteen later that year and moved out of home, her parents, her adoptive parents, were happy to see her move into a share house with Matt and a couple more of their friends.

Matt and Reya agreed to stick together, their commonalities drawing them together, opening up about their pasts, revealing their secrets, their friendship deepening. Then, for the second time in her life, after first having received the news that the mother and father she loved were not her biological parents, Matt confided a secret to her and her world was completely upended. She made a solemn pact with him, swearing to always be there and to take it all to the grave. There were tears in her eyes, and in his.

The share house was rowdy, with a revolving door of characters dropping into and out of the lives of its occupants. Reya dated cautiously, but Matt, being just that little bit older, threw himself into it with all the energy of youth. They both attended the same college, Matt choosing Engineering while Reya did Social Sciences, caught inescapably in each other's orbits, gravitationally bound by their shared secrets.

Reya's boyfriends came and went, sometimes literally as well as figuratively, and the little seed of a thought began to grow in the back of her head. What if she was like her mother after all, what if the genes were inescapable? Lying in bed in the dark at two o'clock in the morning, drunk still and alone again after a one-night-stand, she could almost feel the strings tugging at her. What if that was her life, to marry and find herself with kids to a man she never really loved? Would she walk that same path? Would her relationship break down, leaving her with children of her own and a need for escape through the drink? Her lecture courses painted a picture of habit forming, of history repeating itself in certain social instances, and she recognised all the warning signs in herself.

Reya had gone in the middle of the night to the only person who would understand. He had wrapped his arms around her as she cried in the dark, and then he'd done the most unforgivable thing: he'd kissed her.

---

Mah opened the door for her, and they went back inside. There was only one thing she could do. Matt had all her secrets. She would have to tell him about the feeling in her tummy, about the tests, and the awful thing it meant about the future. It wasn't fair, she thought bitterly, but then very little in life seemed to be fair. She turned her wedding ring around and around on her finger. A lot of it seemed to be entirely and inescapably random acts of hurt.

Reya made them dinner that evening, but she picked at hers.

"Not hungry?" Matt asked, looking across at her.

"Nah."

"Tummy?"

"Yeah."

"Still? You should go get that checked out. It's been weeks."

"I guess."

Matt twirled his fork in the tangle of fettucine and stuffed it into his mouth. "It's good," he muttered around his mouthful.

Reya nibbled at her pasta, watching Matt eat, the horrible sinking feels weighing heavily now. She put her fork down and the words began to come out almost before she was ready.

"I already went to the doctor again," she confessed.

Her hand settled on her tummy.

Matt took another forkful of pasta, nodding. "And?" he said.

"He did some follow-ups."

"For food poisoning? I thought you said he'd told you it'd be a couple of days of throwing up and then that's it."

"Yeah, he did, but...."

"But that was over a month ago."

Matt's fork hovered over his plate. He frowned.

"Yeah, babe, so I went in for a follow-up."

"You've been having pains all this time? Why didn't you say something?"

Reya broke eye contact, staring down at her half-finished meal.

"I came good, after. I thought I'd got it all out of my system. But then, I started to feel off."

"Off? Like what?"

"Nausea. I looked it up online. Sometimes after you get food poisoning, your body takes a little while to get back to normal. It's like your digestive system is hypersensitive, reacting to the littlest things. I thought it was that."

Matt put his cutlery down carefully and reached out to grasp her hand. She could see the concern in his eyes. He was trying not to show it, but she was scaring him.

"Reya, I love you. Just tell me," he said, his voice softer now.

"I suspected something, but I got the test results back on Friday. They were sitting in the damn envelope for two days before I got up the nerve to open it."

"Tell me."

Matt's attention shifted to her hand over her abdomen, then up to the fear in her eyes.

"Baby, tell me," he repeated. "Cancer? Ovarian?"

At the word, Reya's vision blurred and the tears came. Matt was there, all at once, wrapping his arms around her as she cried.

"No, worse than that," Reya whispered. "I'm pregnant."

---

They had built a life for themselves, Matt graduating first and getting an internship at an aerospace company. He earned enough to set them both up with a little apartment where Reya could still get to college and he didn't have an endless commute to his office. It seemed so simple, setting up home together, sharing their lives, their bed. It had all clicked into place like destiny. It just felt right, like nothing else in her life had ever felt before.

When she'd finally graduated, Matt parlayed his internship into a job in another city and they moved away. He went down on one knee by the river on the first day of March and she put on his ring. She phoned her parents, her real parents, not her biological father, with the news and what they said brought her to tears again. The magnitude of their understanding, took her breath away.

She went to the local government offices and reverted her name to her birth name, taking up Arnaud and leaving behind Curtis. It was one of the hardest things she'd ever done, because it felt like a betrayal of her parents. But, it smoothed the friction out of their lives, sharing Matt's surname. People saw their wedding rings and heard their last names and that was as much as anyone needed to know, even the bank. They got themselves a mortgage and a proper car and spent a decade travelling the world together as Matt's job took him to other countries.

Eventually they returned back to where they grew up and Reya took up work at the agency that had been so instrumental in her life, settling into a neighbourhood two suburbs over from her parents. They went to barbeques, helped out at fundraisers, like all the married couples around them, with one difference: all their friends had children.