PART ONE
CHAPTER1
ONE, TWO, THREE.
Plus the one I’d taken right then and there in the dimly lit grocery store bathroom. That made four.
Four white plastic sticks sat perched on the edge of my sink. Each had a tiny window at its head.
In the window of the first one, taken at the store, two blue lines formed a cross.
When the second blue line first started to appear, my pulse had raced. Still sitting on the cold toilet seat, I picked it up and peered at it closely, carefully examining it from every angle. Maybe it was just a shadow. A reflection of the other blue line. A drop that had ricocheted into the window?
Eventually, there was no denying it—there were two blue lines, and they formed a cross.
I burst out of the bathroom stall before realizing my pants were still around my ankles. I ducked back in and pulled myself together, then speedwalked over to the family planning aisle—an unfortunate name, since I had no intention of planning a family. At least, not now. I grabbed three more boxes of tests, this time opting for the fancy digital ones that promised me a word rather than a bunch of blurry lines that obviously couldn’tbe trusted. I took them home, chugged an entire can of La Croix, and peed on all of them.
Now here they were, all screaming at me at once, forcing me to face my future with a single word.
Pregnant.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to erase the image from my head, and walked out of my bathroom. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t.
I’ve finally lost it—the last remaining shred of my sanity. I’m seeing things.
I rubbed my eyes to clear the haze, walked back into the bathroom, and looked at them again.
Pregnant.
“What the hell?”
The buzz of my apartment’s intercom pulled me out of my stupor. A female voice floated into the room. “It’s me, let me in.”
I’d called Ellie after the first test, verbally vomiting a gush of unintelligible gibberish as I barreled out of the grocery store bathroom. She’d interrupted my tirade and said, “Savannah—calm down! I’m on my way. I’ll meet you at your apartment.”
I opened the door. Ellie’s eyebrows were sky-high as she waited for me to speak, but I couldn’t. She’d seen me speechless like this once before, almost a year ago, when I came home from work to find my boyfriend of several years—and all his belongings—gone from the apartment we’d shared.
“Okay, okay.” She took my hands in hers. I could see her wheels turning. “Well, people get false results all the time. Especially if you bought one of those really cheap tests. Maybe we should get you a better one, just in case.”
Dazed, still holding her hand, I led her into my bathroom. Like a sad, broken-down Vanna White, I presented her with the four tests, still lined up on the edge of the sink, like eager little soldiers reporting for duty.
Ellie’s blue-gray eyes just about popped out of her head; her jaw dropped. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah … holy shit,” I agreed, finally finding my voice.
My best friend turned to look at me, eyes wide. “Oh my God, Savvy—you’re pregnant. You’re going to have a baby.”
“I’m … I’m …” My tongue simply could not wrap itself around those words.
I was in such a delicate place. It had been just under a year since Jason had left, without warning. Rebuilding a life without him had not been easy, especially in a place as fast-moving and expensive as San Francisco.
Jason and I had been together for four years, living together for three and a half. We’d had a plan.
We both said we wanted kids, but not right away. We were focused on hitting milestones in our careers. Three years, we guessed—by then, the tech startup Jason worked for should be in more stable shape, likely thinking about their IPO, and hopefully I’d have been promoted to account manager at the marketing agency I worked for. That would be the best time, we decided—right around my thirty-third birthday. The biological clock would still be ticking, with at least a few good years left in the battery.
Marriage was never important to either of us. Jason’s parents had never bothered to get married, and their family had turned out just fine. On my side, my father had left my mother when I was a baby, before my tiny brain even had the ability to form memories of him. He’d left my mom in the lurch, and she’d had to work hard for our survival. What’s the point of getting married if it does nothing to keep two people together? We never heard from him again. My mom was forced to fight for years to obtain a divorce without having the slightest clue where to send the papers.
I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. Jason and I were together because we chose to be—and that choice was going to prove stronger than any legal document. Or so I thought.
