“Yeah,” I said with nervously darting eyes. I knew that he could tell I was acting strangely. I could see it in the way that he was looking at me. “Can I use your bathroom?”

He looked over my shoulder at the door to my apartment just a few doors down. Then he looked back at me in confusion. I could see his mouth start to open and his brow furrow. He was going to ask me why in the world I was coming to his apartment to use the bathroom, when my own was within a few steps from me. But then he looked down and saw the drugstore bag in my hand.

“Of course,” he said softly and wrapped his arm around my shoulder as he walked me inside.

I had to hand it to him; Adam didn’t ask me a single question about it. He just sat down on the couch while I went to the bathroom and waited for me to come out.

I took the test, left it on the bathroom sink, and set the timer on my phone. I wondered if Michael had started to think that maybe I was taking too long at the store, but I figured I still had some time left before he actually got worried. He wouldn’t think to come look for me here, so I didn’t need to worry about that. I had a few minutes of peaceful solitude as I waited for the test results to finish processing.

But I found myself not wanting solitude at all while I waited. I wanted to sit with Adam. I opened the bathroom door to come out and then closed it halfway behind me. Then I walked out into Adam’s living room with my phone gripped in my hand as the timer counted down. Adam didn’t say a word when I sat down beside him. He simply put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into a hug against him as we waited together.

19

“Hey,” Michael said, coming up to give me a kiss when I walked into the apartment.

He was already fully dried and dressed from his shower since I had taken a while.

“Everything okay? I was starting to worry that I would have to come look for you since you took a while.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just couldn’t decide which kind of shampoo I wanted to get.”

Michael looked down at my empty hands and clearly noticed that there was no shopping bag and no shampoo. Fuck. I had forgotten about it altogether.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I still need to get used to the fact that running late doesn’t mean someone has been kidnapped. Old habits die hard.”

“Yeah,” I chuckled, trying not to make it sound artificially forced. “It takes a bit of getting used to. I’m glad that we don’t have to worry about those things anymore though.”

“So am I,” he said. “So what was the verdict?”

“Huh?” I felt instantly dizzy and the room felt as though it was closing in.

“On the shampoo,” he said as he motioned to my hands. “It doesn’t look like you found one that you liked.”

“Oh, right,” I said with immediate relief. “Yeah, I hated all of the ones they had at the store. I’m just going to order one online.”

I walked past him and toward the bathroom.

“Did you want to have that celebratory champagne tonight?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure. That sounds fun.”

“You okay, Lisette?”

“Yep, I’m fine. Just going to take a shower and then I’ll be out.”

“Didn’t you already take one this morning?”

“Yeah, but I just feel like another.”

“Must be that crappy shampoo, huh? You should go ahead and order a new one when you get out.”

“I will,” I lied with a nervous smile as I went into the bathroom and closed the door.

I stood there for a second inside the small and quiet bathroom before turning the water on. Then I undressed slowly and stepped into the shower. The warm water felt good and comforting as it ran down over my body. Instinctively, as if it had somehow just become the natural thing for me to do, I placed the palms of my hands over my stomach and held them there.

I don’t know what I was expecting to feel. It wasn’t as if my stomach would feel differently in my hands, at least not yet. When the tears started to fall from my face and mix with the falling water of the shower, I didn’t know why I was crying. I sighed and tilted my head back in the shower to let the water run down the back of my head. I might have been crying for several reasons at once.

I was pregnant.Actually pregnant, for real this time.

I was scared to become a mother, and I was terrified at how Michael would feel and react to this turn of events. I was also strangely happy and excited. Obviously, it wasn’t something that I had planned for and it was a complete shock. But this was something that had happened because of the love and passion that Michael and I had together. How could anything that was created from that be something bad?

I finished my shower and got dressed slowly. I needed to tell Michael and I needed to tell him today. I wasn’t going to hide anything from him ever again. So no matter what his reaction would be, I had to tell him.

When we uncorked the champagne and sat down on the couch together, Michael raised his glass to clink against mine.

“Cheers,” he said. “To all the good things that are going to come our way.”

I felt my lips press together as I tried to join him in a celebratory toast but couldn’t. I couldn’t toast our wonderful new future together without telling him about the newest and most important part of it.

“You okay?” he asked as he noticed my hand frozen mid-air, with the gold-colored champagne shaking in the glass.

I was so hesitant to tell him that I was pregnant. It could ruin everything. It could change everything, and once I told him, there was no way to take it back. He might completely freak out and be upset, and I was scared of that.

“Michael—” I choked on my own voice for a moment, but I forced myself to push through and do it anyway. “I’m pregnant.”

He looked at me with a blank stare. No reaction at all seemed even worse than an upset reaction.

“Michael?” I asked nervously.

“Are you being serious?” he asked.

“Yes.”

I stared motionless at his face, searching for any kind of reaction at all that I could read. He turned his head away from me for a moment while he set his champagne glass on the surface of the coffee table. When he turned back to face me, his eyes were wet.

“God Michael, I am so sorry,” I said as I started to cry. “I’m so sorry. I know this isn’t what you expected or what you wanted. It must have happened on the night in the woods.”

“Sorry?” he said as his voice cracked.

Tears started to pour down my face, and I could feel my lips start to tremble. I was on the verge of breaking down into sobs. This couldn’t ruin things—it just couldn’t, not after everything that we had been through together, and not now when things were finally starting to go so well for us.

“Lisette,” he said as he reached for my hands and placed them into his lap. “You don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

“Yes, I do,” I cried. “This isn’t what we need right now. You have a brand new position, and I have a good job at the shelter and so many projects that I want to do like the greenhouse on the roof. We are just getting started and this is going to ruin everything. This isn’t what you wanted.”

Michael lifted his hand to wipe the tears on my face with his fingertips. Then he pulled me closer toward him so that our faces were almost touching.