Chapter 12: The Pregnancy Scare

One month later the calendar on my phone still showed the beach house dates circled in faded blue, but the life I’d slipped back into felt like a cheap photocopy of the man who’d left it. Sarah’s routine had hardened into something sharper—early mornings at the office, late nights scrolling reports on the couch, her body brushing mine in bed like an afterthought. I told myself the distance was normal, the kind that settled after seven years, but every time my phone lit up with Kayla’s name the truth clawed higher in my throat. The furniture-moving afternoon in her new place had left marks I couldn’t wash off: the faint scent of her on my collar that Sarah never noticed, the way my fingers still remembered the heat of her ass under the shower spray while she chatted with her sister on speaker.

The text came on a Wednesday evening while I was loading the dishwasher. Kayla’s name flashed across the screen with no emoji, no flirt, just four words that stopped my lungs mid-breath.

My period is late.

I stared at it until the letters blurred. Sarah was in the next room folding laundry, humming some pop song she’d heard on the radio. My stomach dropped like a stone down an empty well. We’d been careful—mostly. Pills, timing, the frantic pull-out in the dunes that one afternoon. But one month of stolen afternoons and desperate hotel lunches had blurred the lines until nothing felt safe anymore.

I typed back with shaking thumbs: When? How late?

Three dots. Then: Ten days. I’m scared, Mark. Can you meet me tomorrow after work? Pharmacy run. Then somewhere private.

Sarah called from the living room asking if I wanted pasta or stir-fry. I answered on autopilot, voice steady as glass, while my mind spun through every possible ending. A baby. Her sister’s baby. My marriage in shards on the kitchen tile. The thought should have terrified me into deleting the thread. Instead it sent a dark, electric current straight through my veins—fear and want braided so tight I couldn’t pull them apart.

The next afternoon we met at a big-box pharmacy ten miles from both our places, the kind with fluorescent lights that made everything look sterile and unforgiving. Kayla waited in the parking lot, arms wrapped around herself in a loose gray hoodie and yoga pants, hair in a messy bun that still managed to look beautiful. Her eyes were wide, the kind of wide that comes from nights spent staring at the ceiling. No smirk this time. Just raw need when she saw me.