Chapter 18 Itried to forget him. Christ, I tried. I deleted his number. I archived every text, tossed the dresses I'd worn the three nights in Tulum into the back of my closet like they might destroy me if I saw them. He reached out - three times exactly. A text, and two calls, leaving one voicemail that wasn't even a message, just silence before a click. It didn't matter. I didn't respond. I knew what would happen if I did, knew I'd fall right back into his gravity, knew I'd be too goddamn stupid to pull myself out of it. So instead, I just kept going. Kept living my life, finished out the last couple of weeks of the school year like a zombie, threw myself into prep for next year's students the second the bell rang on the last day. I tried. I tried to ignore the aching in my chest and the twisting in my gut anytime I thought about him. Except the twisting got worse. It wasn't as bad at first. I blamed him, blamed the humid Atlanta heat getting to me, blamed the end-of-the-school-year stress, the long days, and too little sleep. But then it wasn't just twisting. It morphed, turning into nausea and bone-deep fatigue, stress that had built so high I would snap at the smallest things and then cry over it two minutes later because I felt too overwhelmed to handle it. I barely made it into summer break, and when I flaked on Jules for the third time in two weeks, she showed up at my door unannounced, with coffee, and only slightly annoyed. "You're clearly not okay," she'd said, sitting sideways on the couch beside me, her iced latte sweating in her grasp. "You look like you've been hit by a bus." I'd glared at her as I sucked my iced americano through the soggy paper straw. "Wow. Thanks." "I'm serious, Si," she'd murmured, her deeply tanned, manicured hand resting gently on my knee. I'd winced at the nickname - she didn't use it often, but Ryan had used it constantly. God, even Ryan hurt to think about nowadays. "You've been off for a month. Maybe longer. I've barely seen you, and the last time we went out, you cried when you saw a golden retriever." "He looked like the one I had when I was a kid," I'd retorted, steeling my jaw. She didn't push it again that day. She'd stayed with me for a few hours, watched a couple of episodes of some terrible reality show that she swore was the best thing on television, and made me promise to go with her to get classroom supplies for the new school year a few days later. But when I'd opened the door for her that morning, my face sheet white and my stomach uncooperative, my brain fuzzy and my head pounding from throwing up three times already that morning, she didn't give me a choice. "Urgent care," she said, grabbing my purse from the kitchen counter and pushing me out the door, an unused cooking pot in one hand. I grumbled, protested, and called her overdramatic. But deep down, I was scared enough to go. I'd spent weeks, almost months now, trying to convince myself that I was okay and just dealing with either the stupidest heartbreak of my life or a really shitty stomach bug. But it was becoming more and more unmanageable. Jules had let me go in alone, opting to sit in the car and wait for me instead. The nurse I spoke to was nice enough - she took my vitals, asked the usual questions, furrowed her brows when I told her how long the symptoms had been going on, jotted it down in her notes with a nod. She took my blood pressure, my pulse, listened to my heart, checked my weight, and glanced at me when I cringed at the number that was definitely lower than it had been months ago. "Let's run a blood panel," she said calmly, wheeling over to me with a cart full of needles and tubes. "Just to rule some things out. Okay?" I rolled my lips between my teeth, taking a deep, shuddering breath. "Okay." I didn't ask what "things" meant. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to know. When I got out, I had a missed call and about ten texts from Jules profusely apologizing for needing to run, but that someone had called out of her summer job and she got called in. She'd sent me the money for a ride with at least twenty hearts in the reference line and a, "Please call me when you know what's going on." So, I stepped out into the stupidly hot Georgian heat with a band-aid on my inner elbow and my stomach in a nervous knot, only half as nauseous as I was before but just as panicked, and walked. I wasn't sure where I wanted to go, wasn't sure if I should just book an Uber, but I didn't want to be at home. I felt too antsy to sit still, but too queasy to go far. I ended up at a little coffee shop a few blocks away after spending approximately ninety seconds in the bookstore next to it before deciding that the candle burning on the counter was so intensely sickly smelling that I couldn't be in there a second longer. The AC was too cold and the sound of steaming milk and banging metal too loud inside the cafe, so I took an iced coffee to go and sat at one of the little tables outside, watching the street like somehow it would solve my problems and give me solutions to questions I wasn't sure I wanted answered. A few hours. That's what they'd said. So, I left my phone face-up on the table, waiting, not quite panicking, but nervous. In my head, I was trying to give myself the least damaging possibilities - iron deficiency, stomach ulcer, mono. But the worse ideas crept in instead, something autoimmune, something unpronounceable and incurable, something permanent. I tried to tell myself not to spiral, but my chest was tight, my skin too warm, and the longer my phone screen was off and without a notification, the more it felt like the floor was crumbling beneath my feet. By the time I'd managed to take a sip, the ice in my coffee was almost fully melted, people had come and gone, the world moving around me despite as I sat stationary, locked, stuck, checking my phone every two seconds to see if anything new had popped up. Nothing. My list of already-read emails taunted me every time. I willed myself to look at anything but my phone. Stared at the massive oak beside the cafe, stared at the stones on the sidewalk in front of me, stared at the pigeon with a foot missing standing on the table two over from mine. Stared at the man across the street. The man with mostly silver hair and a phone held to his ear, walking with his back to me, a boy with dark curls walking beside him with a dinosaur backpack and his hand clutched in his father's. For a second, I convinced myself that I was losing my mind, now, too - that it wasn't just the nausea, the exhaustion, or the way I felt like death, but now I could add hallucinations to the list. But the world wasn't that kind. Zach's head turned in my direction, and he stopped in his tracks, nearly losing his balance when Matt failed to notice in time and almost pulled him along with him. A smile so wide it cracked my fucking chest in two broke across Zach's face, and then he was being hauled up, one arm around his waist as Matt easily lifted him onto his side without so much as a question. I didn't know what to do. Didn't know if I should do anything at all. But Zach was pulling on his dad's shirt, trying to get his attention, and I didn't know if I was going to be sick again or if my heart had actually just given out on me out of pity. Matt paused. Looked down at Zach, furrowed his brow, mid-step and mid-sentence on the phone, the kind of stillness that had nothing to do with hesitation and just screamed what do you mean? But he turned. He looked straight at me. Straight across the street, straight through traffic, straight through two months of silence and nights neither of us had spoken of again. I couldn't breathe. Zach was saying something, too far for me to hear it, but Matt just held my gaze, his mouth parted, and his arm clutched around Zach, his lips unmoving despite the phone in his hand. A ding echoed out from my table. I nearly jumped. The sound cut through everything - the tension, the confusion, the question of whether I was really hallucinating him this vividly or if the world just hated me, and my eyes dropped to the screen of my phone. One new email. Lab Results Available, read the subject line. I fumbled as I unlocked it, briefly forgetting my passcode when it didn't recognize my face, and I opened the email, my throat closing, the air in my lungs feeling too thin. I skimmed, trying to make sense of medical jargon I didn't understand, vitamin levels slightly lower than they should be with a note next to it that said, Struggling to keep food down. But lower than that, three letters in a row that I didn't know the meaning of stood out in bold with multiple notes beside it: HCG. Note: Patient is positive for pregnancy. Approx 8-10 weeks. Inform and refer on. It didn't register at first. I just stared at it like the word might morph into something else if I blinked hard enough, something more manageable, something I could laugh about, something that didn't have anything to do with the man I might have just hallucinated. But it didn't change. It didn't fucking change. Positive for pregnancy. I was pregnant. I was pregnant. My breath caught as I finally managed to suck in air. The noise around me faded into TV static and my rapid pulse. My hands shook, badly, barely holding the phone. Everything, everything, seemed to tilt, the world shifting on its axis. I looked up, half expecting to find him still standing there, still staring at me, but the sidewalk across the street was empty. Matt and Zach were gone, if they'd ever been there at all. I sat there, frozen, overheated in a cracked plastic chair outside a run-down cafe, clutching my phone that had just detonated the entire future I'd already thought I'd gotten a handle on the moment Matt's money had hit my account two months ago. Pregnant. Fucking pregnant.