A/N: Short chapter to start, but necessary - sorry!

Rachel stared at the pregnancy test for a full minute but she had known what it would say before she even took it. She'd known what the first test would say before she saw it, by this third time she was only feeding her own panic. She rocked on the top of the toilet seat, sitting on her hands and watching the tap drip in a kind of trance. She could feel her mind running at a thousand mile hour, thoughts blurring as they passed, but at the same time it was frozen in numb disbelief.

Eventually she realises it's kind of cold in that bathroom and her feet have disconnected from circulation. She wiggles her toes, watching, childishly fascinated, as they move without her feeling it and, eventually, the pink glow of blood suffuses across her skin once more. Then she slides off the loo and pads out of the bathroom on the hunt for a coffee. She really wants a vodka or something suitably tranquillising, but, without really thinking about it, she has slipped into the maternal mind-set and opts instead for the next best thing.

The gurgle of the somewhat clunky second-hand machine is oddly soothing and she remembers something Brittany had said about water being happy and thinks, not for the first time, how smart that girl really is.

It is when she is sat on the worn couch, legs tucked up under her fluffed dressing-gown, that she realises she should do something about what she just found out. She's an adult for real now. But, with a curious detachment he realises that all she really wants to do is cry. Hard. Preferably for ever.

And then she knows. And it is so obvious that she doesn't understand how it wasn't her first thought. She guesses her thought processing wasn't too great (she thinks once more of the vodka, wistful). She picks up the phone and dials the one person in this world she knows will understand how one tiny blue cross can shatter your life into a thousand jagged pieces that will never fit back the same way ever again.

She dials without thinking that it's 2am or that she hasn't spoken to this girl, really spoken to her, for a year or more.

'Hello?' a sleep-soaked voice blears.

'Quinn. It's Rachel. I need your help'.