The Lie

I’m a wreck. I can barely make it to my classes and at night I can barely grade my papers. My thesis doesn’t even exist. It’s hard to do anything but wallow in the pain and some nights I can’t breathe because my chest is hollow and I’m crying too hard to let anything in.

Those are the nights I know Melissa can hear me but I’m so distraught – so lost – that I can’t even hide it, can’t keep quiet. I know she’s loving the pain, the tears, how my supposedly perfect life has been taken down a peg.

But it’s not a peg. It’s everything.

Brigs was everything.

So it’s stress, I tell myself once again as I go into the bathroom, grateful that Melissa isn’t home so I can do this in peace. Just stress.

I take in a deep breath, follow the instructions, and pee on the stick.

I stare at the pink lines.

Seconds pass.

I will the second line not to appear.

But one line does.

And then another.

Two pink lines.

A positive.

“No,” I cry out softly. I shake the stick rapidly, as if that will change the results.

But it doesn’t.

Fuck.

I’m pregnant.

No, I tell myself. These kind of tests are faulty so early in the game. Get another.

And so I do. I run out down the block and I buy two.

Then I do both and the results are the same.

Pregnant.

Pregnant.

No doubt.

Now Melissa is home and I’m in a full-on panic. I have to smuggle the tests out of the bathroom because I don’t dare throw them away in the rubbish there. She’ll see and then she’ll go after Brigs. She would think she has proof that I didn’t listen.

I shut myself in my room, hiding the tests in a plastic bag and shove it under my bed for now and I try and plan what to do next. I have to have a plan.

But I don’t have a plan.

How could I ever plan for this?

I sit on my bed and try to think but all the emotions have a chokehold on my heart.

I’m pregnant.

With Brigs’ child.

Holy fuck.

I’m so totally screwed because I’m not with Brigs, because I can never be with Brigs and I’m going to have go through everything alone. I don’t have family here to lean on. I don’t know how I can have a baby and still go to school. I don’t even know how I can afford a child, period.

But then…then through my racing heart and the impending panic attack and the sense of utter doom, there is something else.

Something I never thought I’d feel before.

Hope.

I’d always figured I’d have kids one day when I met the right person, but to be honest they weren’t really on my mind. Maybe because I had such a messy childhood. Maybe because my whole life has been about trying to figure it all out. I focused on school, on film, on the things I thought I wanted. Even relationships were something I pushed aside.

But this…even though I would be alone through it, it’s Brigs’. The man I love beyond anything. The child would be the product of two people who loved each other so very much. Two people who loved each other so much that they would find each other again, even with the whole world against them.

A wave of fear washes over me, the one that tells me how unprepared I am, how hard it’s going to be to go at it alone, that I don’t know what I’m doing.

But then I realize how god damn stupid I’m being.

Selfish, stupid and terribly na?ve.

The thing is, I can’t go through it alone.

Even if I wanted to, I can’t.

I have to tell Brigs.

It goes against everything that I set out to do and it risks everything once more.

But I can’t have this child without him knowing it.

He deserves to know.

He has to know.

Brigs lost his only child.

This is his second chance.

For me to stand in the way of that…I couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t do it to myself. I couldn’t do it to the baby.

I have to tell him.

No matter what he says, what I think, he has to know.

My heart bubbles up with urgency, warm at the thought of seeing him again, but I have to do this properly. Tomorrow I’ll go to the clinic and take a test with the doctor, just to make sure. Then I’ll go to his office and hope to god I’m not seen by Melissa.

Understandably, I can barely go to sleep. I toss and turn all night.

My emotions go in waves.

I think about how Brigs will react. Will he be afraid? Happy?

I think about his job. Will he lose it? Keep it?

I think about being pregnant, about how I don’t know anything and how lost I’m going to be.

I’m so scared.

I’m so alive.

I’m buzzing with a million different feelings and in the end they’re all wild and warm.

I have Brigs’ baby growing inside me.

Too small at the moment to count.

But it already counts for so much.

This changes…everything.





CHAPTER TWENTYTHREE

Brigs



“Thank you, Brigs,” Dr. Sarah Chalmers, the department chair of the university tells me with a polite smile as I ease myself out of the seat. “We’re glad that you told us everything when you did.”

I lean over to shake her hand, hoping my palm is dry. “I’m glad you and Phillip were able to see me,” I say, glancing over at the dean, Phillip Buck. As usual, his expression is blank, giving me nothing.