3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Waking up the following morning did not change a damn thing. It had not been a nightmare after all. Rich really had run out on me yesterday and cleared his possessions out of my condo. I knew this to be true because my body and soul ached just as badly as my heart did.

As happened so often in the past couple weeks, I felt slightly nauseous and dizzy when I first stood up, but I immediately waved it away, thinking it was just stress.

I grabbed my phone to take into the bathroom with me and quickly realized that I must have bumped one of the screens when I was moving around in my pre-coffee zombie shuffle. When I glanced down, the health tracker for my phone was pulled up and something stood out immediately. Cycle Tracking: Light flow. Then my eyes bugged out when one line down it showed the damning words that would change everything: 77 days ago.

“No!” I hissed before opening the app and taking a better look. I was not about to panic. Surely, I had just forgotten to put the information in my app. That had to be it. Right?

My last period was in early December. The last one that I tracked anyway. I dove into the cabinet beside the toilet and looked at my supplies. Still fully stocked. When had I last stocked up? Thankfully, because of my busy schedule, I could track that, too. I moved to the app for the grocery store where I ordered all of my items for either pick up or delivery and sure enough, as I scrolled through the last few orders, not once had I bought new sanitary supplies for my periods.

“This cannot be happening.”

I called my gynecologist’s office only to be told by an answering service that I needed to try back during business hours on Monday. Shit. It was Saturday. How was I supposed to wait that long for confirmation? Did I even need to wait? How was it possible that it had been seventy-seven days since my last period, and I was only just now realizing it? Didn’t women get sick or something when they got pregnant?

I growled out my frustrations into the empty room before tossing on a pair of jeans – that were a wee bit too snug – a t-shirt, and a pair of sandals. Then, I grabbed my purse and was out the door. The drug store would have my answers just as surely as the doctor’s office would.

Two hours later, I sat there on the bathroom floor staring at three different tests. All of them confirmed that I was indeed pregnant. One had a plus sign, another had two pink lines, while the last simply showed the word, “pregnant” in the result window.

I attempted to call Rich. He needed to know, after all, even if he had been a jerk to me. It rang once and went to voicemail.

“Rich, I don’t know what happened yesterday, and this isn’t about that. We need to talk. I have something I need to tell you.”

I hung up after that. Then I waited and didn’t stop waiting until Monday, when I was able to make an appointment that was still a week away. The nurse told me that if I thought I was pregnant, I should start taking prenatal vitamins and that they’d see me soon.

That was all well and good. What wasn’t going well, was the fact that Rich never called back. He didn’t text either. There wasn’t even an email concerning the new ads we had been working on to go with all the rebranding we’d done at work. There was just silence. I debated sending the news in a text, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I tried once again to make that call. I even made the call from the line in my office in the hopes that Rich would finally pick up.

He didn’t answer. I got his secretary again, and either he really wasn’t in the office, or she was doing a good job of playing “dodge my ex-girlfriend” for him. The bastard. I tried his cell once more and left another voicemail.

“I have news to share with you. Whether you hate me now – or whatever your reason for running away and ghosting me – this is something you need to know. Stop ignoring me and be a fucking man about things!”

I hung up, hands shaking, unsure of where that sudden burst of anger came from, especially when it was followed so closely by the salty burn of tears.

I quickly wiped away my tears when someone knocked softly on my office door. “Come in,” I called out before having to clear the emotion that left a rasp to my voice.

“I just wanted to check on you today,” Bridgette announced as she walked into my office, shut the door behind her, and then took a seat across the desk from me. I loved Bridge to death, but having her bear witness to my heartache was awful. “Has he contacted you at all?”

I shook my head. “I’ve left messages and even called the office there,” I admitted.

“Maybe you should give it time before you do that,” she suggested. The pity in her eyes made me want to snap and angrily yell at her about how her man knew what was going on. It would be so much easier if he would just tell me. She probably knew, too.

“I have some news that can’t really wait.”

Bridgette’s shoulders slumped and I didn’t miss the disappointing look she threw my way before trying to set her poker face in place. “Honey, I think it would be best if you just left well enough alone and chalked that relationship up to a total loss.”

“Well, Bridge, that’s a little hard to do when we made a baby together and he needs to know about it.”

“You’re pregnant?”

I pulled the Ziplock bag out of my purse that contained the three tests I’d taken and tossed it onto the desk.

“I couldn’t get an appointment with my doctor until next week, but those three say that there’s a baby on the way.”

“When?” She questioned as her eyes bugged out while staring at the tests encased in the plastic bag.

“I don’t know when it happened. I’m guessing the doctor can help with that, but my cycle tracker on my phone says it’s been seventy-seven days – well, seventy-nine now – since my last period.”

“Your cycle tracker?”

“Yeah, the health app on my phone. I track my periods, so I know when to make sure I’m stocked up on supplies.”

“If you track everything, why are you just now taking tests?” She asked then her eyes flew up to mine and her mouth dropped in a shocked little “O”. “Is that what you had wrapped in the box Friday night?”

“No. I didn’t realize until Saturday morning when I woke up and accidentally pulled the tracker up on my phone.”

“Oh, Avi! What are you going to do?”

After lying my head down on my desk, I mumbled the answer. “Have a baby, I guess.”

“It’s too bad your mom won’t be able to help with the baby,” Bridgette announced, as if I needed one more worry on my plate. I hadn’t even thought about my own mother in all of this. I would be lucky if she didn’t disown me over an out of wedlock pregnancy.

Wouldn’t that just be ironic? The main reason I refused to relocate to my lover’s town was because I needed to be close to take care of my mother, but would my mother actually be there for me? Obviously, she couldn’t physically help, but would she be there emotionally? I didn’t know. What I did know was that even if she never spoke to me again, she already did me an accidental favor by making it readily apparent exactly what kind of man my ex-lover was. He wasn’t the kind of man who had staying power. He ran when things got tough, and that wasn’t someone I wanted in my corner as a life mate. Fuck Richard Thomlinson.

I was strong enough to be a single mom and he was too cowardly to be a father.