Page 61 of Accidental Mile High Daddy
Zach was saying something, too far for me to hear it, but Matt just held my gaze, his mouth parted, and his arm clutched around Zach, his lips unmoving despite the phone in his hand.
Adingechoed out from my table. I nearly jumped.
The sound cut through everything — the tension, the confusion, the question of whether I was really hallucinating him this vividly or if the world just hated me, and my eyes dropped to the screen of my phone.
One new email.
Lab Results Available, read the subject line.
I fumbled as I unlocked it, briefly forgetting my passcode when it didn’t recognize my face, and I opened the email, my throat closing, the air in my lungs feeling too thin.
I skimmed, trying to make sense of medical jargon I didn’t understand, vitamin levels slightly lower than they should be with a note next to it that said,Struggling to keep food down.
But lower than that, three letters in a row that I didn’t know the meaning of stood out in bold with multiple notes beside it: HCG.
Note: Patient is positive for pregnancy. Approx 8-10 weeks. Inform and refer on.
It didn’t register at first.
I just stared at it like the word might morph into something else if I blinked hard enough, something more manageable, something I could laugh about, something that didn’t have anything to do with the man I might have just hallucinated.
But it didn’t change. It didn’tfucking change.
Positive for pregnancy.
I was pregnant.
I was pregnant.
My breath caught as I finally managed to suck in air. The noise around me faded into TV static and my rapid pulse. My hands shook, badly, barely holding the phone. Everything,everything, seemed to tilt, the world shifting on its axis.
I looked up, half expecting to find him still standing there, still staring at me, but the sidewalk across the street was empty.
Matt and Zach were gone, if they’d ever been there at all.
I sat there, frozen, overheated in a cracked plastic chair outside a run-down cafe, clutching my phone that had just detonated the entire future I’d already thought I’d gotten a handle on the moment Matt’s money had hit my account two months ago.
Pregnant.
Fucking pregnant.
Chapter 19
Matt
Iknew it was her before my eyes could focus properly in the blinding sun.
The shape of her, the waves of deep brown hair falling around her cheeks, the grey sweatpants and white tank top like she didn’t give a damn who was looking at her in the middle of the afternoon — but that wasn’t in the way that had drawn me to her in the first place. When she’d worn that stupid yellow sundress, it had been an act of defiance.
But the way she sat there, her lips parted, her shoulders rising and falling too quickly, the messy hair and the equivalent of pajamas on her body, she looked like she’dsurrendered.
She was still her, still a fucking magnet, still glowing, but it was like she was some kind of malfunctioning neon sign. It wasn’tright.
I didn’t even hear what my accountant was saying. My brain stuttered, like someone had hit me square in the face, Zach’s insistent pulling at my shirt and pointing and whining of“Sienna!”falling on deaf ears.
Because our eyes had locked, and I couldn’t see or hear or feel anything but the choices I’d made that night. The one Ihadn’t been able to stop replaying in my head since she’d walked out of my house.
She looked pale, with dark circles under her eyes that I could see all the way across the street, her nails biting into the wood of the table she sat at.
