Page 103 of Best Frenemies

“Okay, then,” she mutters and is already stepping around me to head for the door.

“Katy, wait, I—”

“Whatever, Mack. See you around.”

And just like that, she leaves me standing there by her elevators, and all I can do is watch her head out the door and hop into an awaiting cab.

What in the fuck is going on?

There are so many things wrong with this situation, I don’t even know where to begin.

I don’t know how long I stand there, trying to understand how my coming to check on her ended in some kind of fight, but eventually, I find the strength to head back out of her building and toward the Financial District for my breakfast meeting with a head full of confusion and a heart that feels sliced in two.

What a great fucking start to the day. I’d rather have eaten a live frog.

Katy

It’s not every day you get to spend your Saturday morning spread-eagled and in stirrups, but it’s also not every Friday that you get six positive pregnancy tests.

Dr. Wethers is a physician in Upper Manhattan who not only had Saturday hours but could fit me in on short notice. And by short notice, I mean I called her office first thing this morning and begged her receptionist to fit me in until she was nearly in tears. Poor Carla probably didn’t feel like she had a choice, and for all I know, overbooked the good doctor on account of preventing me from having a breakdown on the phone.

Thankfully, Dr. Wethers hasn’t made me feel like she’s upset about my addition to her schedule. She’s been friendly and informative, and once I peed in a cup and she asked me some questions, I was instructed by her nurse to get undressed so the doctor could perform an ultrasound.

Which leads me to my current situation—all spread out in this small exam room.

“Katy, since you’re most likely very early along, I’m going to have to do a vaginal ultrasound,” Dr. Wethers says as she puts on a pair of gloves. “This ultrasound will be able to give us a little more info and confirm if you’re pregnant.”

Confirm if I’m pregnant. Here goes nothing…

More like everything.

Unbidden, a visual of Mack’s concerned face pops into my head. It’s the look he had when I ran into him near my elevators this morning. He said he was worried about me since I never called him after I left school yesterday, and I was nothing short of a bitch to him.

It’s like the stress and fear of this appointment and not knowing what is going on inside my uterus and not knowing if I’m about to be a mother to Mack’s child turned me into someone I didn’t even recognize.

A bubble of emotion lodges in my throat, and I have to strong-arm myself to stop thinking about that conversation or I just might start sobbing before the doctor even starts my ultrasound.

The nurse turns off the lights in the room and switches on a spotlight that’s pointed right at where my legs are currently in stirrups and a paper sheet is spread over my thighs.

My body is shaking, and I try to control the tremors by gripping the edge of the table, but it does nothing to calm my anxiety. Needless to say, I’m nervous as hell as I lie here, waiting to find out if the rest of my life is about to change in the most drastic of ways.

“You’re going to feel a little pressure as I insert the wand, but it shouldn’t feel painful, okay?” Dr. Wethers updates, meeting my eyes briefly with a reassuring smile on her face.

I can’t smile back, but I do manage an “Mm-hmm.”

She covers the wand with something that looks like an oversized condom, squirts some kind of clear, gooey liquid on it, and the instant it touches my skin, my hips jolt.

And she’s not wrong about the pressure, but it’s tolerable as she puts the ultrasound device inside me.

“Here are your ovaries,” she says, and my eyes stay fixated on the screen above her head. I can’t make anything out; it’s just a mishmash of black and white splotches to my untrained medical eyes.

“And here’s your uterus.” She continues describing what she’s seeing, but still, she could be showing me the inside of my kitchen pipes and I wouldn’t know the difference.

“And this little bean right here is your baby.”

White noise pierces my ears and time stands still as I silently repeat the wordsyour babyin my head.

My baby? My uterus really has a baby inside it?

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