Page 90 of Who's Your Daddy?

“Me too...but we’re very...drunk, Li.” His tiredness dragged each syllable out one at a time. “One...or both...of us are going to fall asleep in the middle of...doing it.” He tossed the sealed condom onto the pile on the floor. “If you don’t...have any regrets tomorrow...we can try this again.”

“Okay,” I agreed, my eyes drifting closed.

“Promise me you’ll still be here when I wake up in the morning.”

I smiled. “I promise.”

And then everything went black.

I sit up. That didn’t happen, right? That wasn’t how the night ended. The night was filled with heated kisses and drunken passion. We had wild, uninhibited sex that night.

Didn’t we?

Of course, we had sex that night. The product of that night is nestled comfortably in my belly right now. That wasn’t a memory. That was just my mind manifesting something weird. I drop back against the couch and continue flipping through the movies on the screen.

The problem is now that I’ve thought of this weird alternate ending, I can’t unthink it. It keeps playing on my mind, invoking more thoughts and prompting more questions.

If we didn’t have sex that night, how did I fall pregnant?

We were even more cautious after that night because we realized how reckless we’d been, so we made sure we always used a condom. We only had sex on one occasion before that, which was on the night we met, and we definitely used condoms that night as well.

So, how did I get pregnant? Maybe one of them broke, and we didn’t realize it. I get my phone out and after some searching, I find out that condoms are only, like, ninety-seven percent effective.

I must be that three percent statistic.

Tossing my phone aside, I continue scrolling through movies, but not even two minutes later, I stop and sit up again. This manifestation – I don’t want to call it a memory because I’m not sure it’s even real – is really bugging me.

That one night is the foundation of my entire relationship with Peter, and this information is an earthquake that has totally shattered that foundation for me.

If I didn’t fall pregnant that night, then—

“Sorry, Dr. Cheng. The math is not mathing. We don’t even know each other for eight weeks.”

I remember thinking the same question Peter had voiced at our first appointment, and Dr. Cheng explained it. She said we needed to add on a couple weeks for the ovulation process. We had known each other for five weeks, plus a couple weeks, and that’s how we got to about nine weeks.

That proves that we had sex that night, and this is just a weird thing my imagination conjured up.

I grab my phone again. I’m just going to put this thing to rest. It’s 16:45. I’m sure Dr. Cheng is still at the office. I pull up her office number on my phone and call her.

The receptionist answers and tells me that Dr. Cheng is busy with a patient, but she’ll ask her to call me once she’s done. The next eighteen minutes are the most excruciating wait I have ever experienced. I’m so stressed and anxious that I answer the phone as soon as it lights up. It doesn’t even ring.

“Hi, Dr. Cheng,” I say, my heavy breaths already giving away my trepidation.

“Hi, Lia. Is everything okay with the baby? Meryl said you sounded panicked.”

Did I?“Yes, everything is fine. I just wanted to ask you something.” I had eighteen minutes to think about this, but I still pause to figure out how to best articulate my question. “So, that day in your office...our first appointment with you, you told us we should allow a few weeks for the ovulation process, so that would’ve started about—”

“Two weeks before conception,” she fills in.

That sounds more finite than I thought. “Just two weeks? Not three or even four weeks before?”

“No. Just two weeks.”

“My cycle was irregular, so that should allow for more time, right?”

“That doesn’t affect how we count the weeks. We assume the fetus is two weeks oldonthe date of conception, regardless of how many weeks your actual ovulation cycle was.”

My heart rate shoots up. “But in your office, you told us to add a couple weeks. Not justtwo.”

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