Twenty Weeks

Nellie knew she was passengering the moment she opened someone else's eyes.

The disorientation hit first. Wrong height. Wrong hands. Male hands, she noticed, watching them reach for a coffee mug she had no control over. The kitchen was unfamiliar. Expensive. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking downtown.

Twelve hours in someone else's body. Twelve hours of being a ghost in a stranger's life.

The body turned. A woman entered the kitchen. Pretty. Pregnant. Very pregnant.

"Morning," the mouth said without Nellie's input. The voice was warm. Familiar. This man loved this woman. Nellie could feel it in the way his chest tightened when he looked at her.

The woman moved slowly, one hand braced against the counter. Her face was pale. Controlled.

"You okay?" the man asked.

"Fine. Just nervous about today."

"We're finally going to find out if it's a boy or girl."

She smiled. It didn't reach her eyes. "Yeah."

The man didn't notice. He was already thinking about work, about the appointment timing, about getting downtown traffic right. Nellie felt his thoughts sliding over the woman's appearance without catching on anything. That's what love did sometimes. Made you blind to the small things.

"I need to use the bathroom," the woman said.

She left. The man sipped his coffee, scrolled through his phone. Nellie was trapped behind his forehead, experiencing his contentment, his anticipation. He was going to be a father. Today felt significant.

The woman returned five minutes later. Changed clothes. Something loose fitting. Her hand kept drifting to her lower abdomen, pressing gently. When she thought the man wasn't looking, her face crumpled for just a second. Then she smoothed it away.

She kissed him. Nellie experienced it. The taste of toothpaste. The smell of her shampoo. The gentle press of her stomach against his. But also the tension in her shoulders. The way her hand gripped his shirt just a moment too long.

The man felt none of it. To him, it was just a morning kiss.

"See you at the hospital," the woman said. "Two o'clock."

"I'll be there."

She left. The man got ready for work. Showered. Dressed. Nellie tried not to pay attention to parts she shouldn't see. She failed. That was the violation of passengering. You saw everything.

But before the man left the bathroom, Nellie caught something he didn't. The trash can. White tissue wadded at the bottom.

Blood.

Not a lot. But enough.

The man walked right past it. Already mentally at work. Already planning his morning. The blood didn't register. Why would it? Pregnancy was messy sometimes. Probably normal.

But Nellie had been there with Marie, her college roommate, through a miscarriage scare. She remembered the panic. The blood. The emergency room at 2 AM. The ultrasound tech's carefully neutral face.

This wasn't about finding out if they were having a boy or girl.

The woman already suspected something was wrong.

Nellie spent the next six hours trapped inside a man who had no idea what his wife might be facing. The morning dragged. Emails. Phone calls. A lunch meeting where the man ordered a sandwich and thought about baby names.

He never called her. Never texted to check in.

Nellie screamed at him from inside his head. Call her. Just call and ask if she's okay. But he couldn't hear her, and she couldn't make his hands move toward his phone.

He trusted everything was fine. Love made him blind that way.

Nellie counted down. She knew when the passenger period would end. Twelve hours from when she'd opened his eyes. Sometime around 6:30 PM. She'd be gone before he found out.

At 1:30 PM, the man grabbed his keys. Started driving toward Mercy Hospital. The appointment was in thirty minutes.

The accident happened on Fifth Street.

Nellie saw the other car running the red light. Saw it too late, same moment the man did. Felt his hands jerk the wheel. Felt the impact. The airbag explosion. The sudden white-hot pain in his left leg.

Then the darkness.

When the man opened his eyes again, Nellie was still there. Paramedics. Blood. Someone cutting away his jeans. The leg was wrong. Bent at an angle legs don't bend.

"My wife," the man said. Nellie felt his panic rising. "I'm supposed to be at Mercy Hospital. My wife is there. She's twenty weeks pregnant. She's waiting for me."

"Sir, you need to stay still."

"Call her. Someone call her."

A paramedic handed him a phone. He dialed with shaking hands. Nellie heard it ring. And ring. And ring.

She's in the ultrasound room, Nellie thought. She can't answer. She's lying on a table right now finding out if there's still a heartbeat.

"She doesn't know I'm here," the man said. His voice cracked. "She thinks I forgot. She thinks I didn't show up."

She doesn't think that, Nellie wanted to scream. She's not thinking about you at all right now. She's listening to a doctor's voice telling her something she already feared. She's alone. You promised you'd be there and she's alone.

They loaded him into the ambulance. He kept trying to call. Each ring felt like a knife. Nellie wanted to reach through whatever barrier separated her consciousness from his and make the phone work through sheer will.

But she couldn't.

At the hospital, they wheeled him into surgery. Anesthesia. The world went soft and distant. His last conscious thought was of his wife, waiting, thinking he'd abandoned her.

The drugs pulled him under. Nellie felt his consciousness fade. She stayed a passenger in an unconscious body for another hour, experiencing nothing but chemical darkness.

Then, exactly twelve hours after she'd arrived, she was gone.

Nellie returned to her own body. Her own bed. Her own apartment. She was already asleep when she came back, her body having gone through its evening routine without her. She didn't wake until 3:17 AM, gasping, tangled in sheets.

The memories were already starting to blur at the edges. Passenger memories faded fast, like dreams you couldn't quite hold onto.

She grabbed her laptop and started typing. Everything she could remember before it slipped away. The woman's pale face. The controlled smile. The blood in the bathroom trash. The accident. The ambulance. Mercy Hospital.

His name. She'd heard it dozens of times that morning. Coworkers greeting him. His email signature. Calendar reminders. But she didn't type it. Couldn't. Using his name felt like crossing a line she couldn't uncross.

She typed for an hour, racing against her own fading recall, keeping him anonymous in every sentence.

When she finished, she had enough. Not everything, but the important parts. The details that mattered.

It took three days of calling every hospital in the city, describing the accident without using his name. When she finally reached the right one, the nurse was confused by her request.

"I'm trying to reach a patient who was in a car accident on Fifth Street. April 3rd. Afternoon."

"Are you family?"

"No. I just...I need to know he's okay."

The nurse paused. "I can't give out patient information."

"Please. Just tell me if he's alive."

Another pause. Then, quietly: "He's stable. Recovery will be long, but he'll walk again."

"And his wife? The baby?"

"I really can't share information about other patients. I'm sorry."

Nellie tried three more times. Three more nurses. None of them would tell her anything beyond the fact that he'd survived.

She hung up and sat in the silence of her apartment.

The not knowing ate at her. The baby. The wife. Whether they were okay or broken or somewhere in between.

She opened her laptop. Stared at the search bar.

She could find him. One search. His name plus the city plus the date. It would take thirty seconds.

She opened the document where she'd written everything down. Scrolled to the top where she'd deliberately left his name out.

She'd heard it dozens of times. It would be easy to—

Nothing.

His name was gone. Completely gone. She could remember the kitchen. The woman's face. The blood in the trash. But his name?

It felt like trying to grab smoke.

She sat there for an hour, grasping at syllables that wouldn't come. Two syllables? Three? Started with...what? Nothing stuck.

Three days since she'd passengered him. Three days since she'd frantically typed everything she could remember. And the one detail she'd deliberately left out was the only one she needed now.

She'd never meet him. Never tell him what she witnessed. The man would never know someone else had been there for his worst day.

That was the rule. That was how society functioned. You stole secrets that would quickly fade.

But that night, Nellie opened the document one more time. Read through everything she'd captured before the memories faded. Then she added one final section.

Not from memory. From a feeling.

She wrote about how the woman knew. How she'd been scared and trying to hold it together. How she'd needed him there and he'd been trying so hard to get there. How neither of them had failed the other.

How the universe had just failed them both.

She didn't know if the baby had survived. Didn't know if the woman forgave him for missing the appointment. Didn't know if they'd tried again or if the loss had broken them.

She'd never know.

She printed it. Put it in an envelope with no address. Put the envelope in her fire safe.

Maybe someday the rules would change. Maybe someday passengers could tell their hosts: I was there. You weren't alone. She wasn't angry. She was just scared.

But probably not.

Nellie locked the safe and went to bed. In the morning, she'd go back to her regular life. The details would fade. The memories would blur until they were all gone.

But the weight of having been there wouldn't. The weight of not knowing how it ended.

It never did.