Chapter 9: Pregnancy Scare

Five days. The little calendar app on my phone had been blinking at me for forty-eight hours straight, but I kept swiping it away like it might disappear if I ignored it long enough. I stood in the pharmacy aisle between cough syrup and vitamins, basket swinging from my fingers, heart hammering so hard the fluorescent lights blurred. Alex had ordered the test in secret the night before he left for college —slipped the link into our late-night text thread with a single winking emoji and the words “just in case Mommy wants to know for sure.” I’d laughed then, thighs still sticky from our goodbye video call. Now the small pink box felt heavier than the world.

I paid cash. The teenage cashier never looked up. Back home I locked myself in the master bathroom, the same one where Mark shaved every morning and never suspected a thing. Alex was on speaker from his dorm, voice low and steady even though I could hear his roommate laughing in the background. “Open it, Mom. I’m right here.”

My hands shook so badly the foil wrapper crinkled like thunder. I peed on the stick, set it on the counter, and sank to the cold tile floor. Three minutes stretched into forever. Alex kept talking—soft nonsense about his first lecture, how he’d worn the panties I mailed him under his jeans all day—but his breathing gave him away. He was just as terrified, just as secretly thrilled.

The two lines appeared crisp and merciless. Negative.

Relief crashed through me first, so sharp my eyes stung. Then something else—something hollow and strangely disappointed that made my cheeks burn. I stared at the little plastic window until the lines blurred. “It’s negative, baby,” I whispered, voice cracking. A single tear slipped free before I could stop it.

Alex exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for weeks. “Thank God ... but fuck, Mom, part of me...” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. I heard the hunger in the silence.