Page 22 of Single Chance

“It’s…unusual, but I’ll take it,” I said.

“Any chance you could be pregnant?” Presley asked. “One of my colleagues has endo pretty bad, but when she was pregnant, the pain went away.”

The bite I’d just swallowed nearly came back up. “N-no,” I said automatically. I tried to remember the date, did the math. Twenty-three days since New Year’s, but… “No.”

I met the gazes of both women, who were watching me with concern.

“Are you sure?” Presley asked.

I picked up my napkin and nervously wiped my mouth as I considered telling them more. It’d been a while since I’d had girlfriends on a confiding level. I’d had several at my teaching job, but we’d gradually lost touch once I quit and wasn’t able to meet them for happy hours or movie nights. With a slow, shaky breath, I realized how much I’d missed that kind of connection.

“My ob-gyn said my odds of ever having children are tiny unless I have a procedure,” I said quietly.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Chloe said, looking genuinely upset for me.

Presley tilted her head. “There’s still a chance, you know? If you were with someone…”

My insides fluttered nervously. I blurted out, “I had a fling on New Year’s Eve.” I could tell them that much, but no way would I reveal who I’d been with.

I could tell they were calculating the weeks.

“Totally possible,” Presley said.

“But so improbable.” I couldn’t think straight. My brain was stuttering along, trying to imagine. In the year plus I’d been with Christian, there’d been no pregnancy scares despite us being careless with birth control.

I’d been devastated by my doctor’s prognosis. I’d always wanted to have babies. When I’d pictured my future, the husband’s face was blurry and unclear, but there were kids in the equation every time. Yes, I’d likely have the procedure eventually to increase my odds, but the question remained whether my body would cooperate with my dream of being a mom.

If one hundred women had the same prognosis, a handful of us could end up pregnant.

What if one of them was me?

No, surely not. It would be the worst timing ever. I’d just started adjusting to being responsible only for me after neglecting myself for so long. This was my healing phase, my refinding myself era. For me to be pregnant would be the utmost in irony ever.

That aside, if by some long-shot, miraculous act of the universe I was pregnant, the circumstances were so not ideal. A one-night stand with a man I barely knew, who apparently had his hands full with a teenage daughter and wanted nothing to do with me beyond working together. And me, a tangle of grief, soul-deep fatigue, and emotional vulnerability. In other words, a verifiable shit show.

“Do you want to take a test?” Chloe asked with so much empathy in her tone I could cry.

God. A pregnancy test. I’d never needed one before. I wasn’t convinced I needed one now.

“Do you think that’s premature?” I asked.

“Not if it happened New Year’s Eve.” Presley squeezed my wrist lightly. “It’s whatever you’re comfortable with, hon. But if it were me, I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew one way or the other.”

“Do you have any other symptoms?” Chloe asked.

I met her eyes as it hit me that, yes, I did. “Nausea.”

Presley sucked in an audible breath.

There was almost no part of me that really thought I could be pregnant. I’d made peace with the odds, mostly, at least until I had the procedure. Or maybe I just hadn’t had any bandwidth to think about it for ages. Pregnancy wasn’t on my radar. This was likely something else, which led to scarier questions. What could be wrong with my body now? Maybe that seemed pessimistic, but I’d struggled with pain for so long that it seemed a lot more logical than being pregnant.

“It’s not too early to test?” I asked, understanding that ruling out pregnancy was my first step.

“Not at all,” Chloe said, breaking up another of her daughter’s chicken fingers into bite-sized pieces. “A little advice though… If you want to avoid gossip, I wouldn’t recommend buying tests at the Country Market. People will find out fast.”

Right. Because I was living and working in a small town now.

“I could go buy some,” Presley said. “They can speculate all they want about me.”

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