And she’s never going to know because I’ll be taking that shit to my grave.
My guilt chokes me. I smile at her, wanting to appease her despite the overwhelming urge to lock myself behind my bedroom door and never, ever come out again. “How about this? I’ll make an appointment to get checked out. Okay?”
She searches my face, uncertain, but eventually nods. Relief softens her shoulders. “Okay. I’ll drive.”
By the time we get there, I’m already eager to get this over with. The urgent care lobby reeks of disinfectant and lemon polish, like someone dumped an entire bottle of cleaner into a bucket and mopped the entire place sterile.
Everything about the place feels too clean, too bright.
The plastic chairs, the flickering fluorescent lights overhead, even the bland pastel posters warning about flu season. They all press in on me, making me feel smaller like I’m an intruder in a world where people come here with real problems. Not anxiety-induced episodes.
Alia sticks by me while a nurse checks me in. I’m slapped with a blood pressure cuff, a thermometer ghosted over my forehead. Her fingers fly over the tablet with my chart, her expression neutral. It should comfort me but for some reason, it doesn’t.
It only makes me feel more fraudulent like I’ve wasted her time by being here.
“You’ll need to pee into a cup,” she tells me, handing one with a lid over.
When I come back, I’m deposited into a small exam room with walls the color of wet sand. There’s a faint hum from the overhead vent, the rustle of paper on the exam table beneath me, the antiseptic tang still clinging to the air.
Alia plays on her phone from the chair next to me.
I bounce my knee, over and over, the rhythm uneven, stuttering, a poor substitute for actually breathing properly. I try to tell myself there’s nothing actually wrong with me—that this is just exhaustion and hunger, the aftershocks of too many sleepless nights, too many skipped meals.
But my brain doesn’t listen. It never does. It turns over possibility after possibility, each one darker than the last. An ulcer, eating away at me from the inside. A tumor growing silently in my brain, waiting for the right moment to snap the cord of my life. Or hell, maybe there’s an aneurysm lurking, ready to burst without warning, one wrong move away from snuffing me out entirely.
I picture the news story. Imagine my body crumpled on the floor of my kitchen, Alia finding me too late, never knowing the truth of why I wasted away.
The shame prickles my skin, hot and cold all at once.
It’s not sickness, not really. It’s guilt. It’s grief. It’s shame.
When the door finally creaks open, I look up too fast, making myself a little dizzy. The doctor steps in, a man in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and kind eyes that somehow make me feel both seen and exposed.
He carries a tablet in his hands, glasses perched low on his nose. Taking a seat on the rolling stool, he pulls up my chart on the screen, flipping through the test results with pursed lips. Then he glances up at me with a faint smile that feels… oddly gentle.
“Well, Miss Bennett, I think I can explain the reason for your general lethargy and poor appetite,” he says, voice warm but professional, the practiced cadence of someone used to breaking news softly.
My pulse kicks into overdrive. My palms are slick where I’ve been pressing them together, gripping so hard my knuckles have gone pale. I try to smile. “Okay. Hit me.”
He looks at me for a moment longer, as though gauging my readiness, then clears his throat. “You’re pregnant.”
For a second, my brain simply refuses to register the words. They hang in the air, absurd, surreal. Pregnant. They don’t belong to me. They belong to some other woman in some other room, not me sitting here feeling the chill of the office seep into my bones.
Alia gasps beside me, her hand flying to her mouth.
“Pregnant?” I repeat. I let out a startled laugh, too loud in the quiet room, because clearly, he’s gotten my chart mixed up with someone else’s. “I—what? No. That’s… there’s no way.”
The doctor only adjusts his glasses, calm in the face of my disbelief. “Yes, Miss Bennett. The test is conclusive. You’re in the early weeks. That explains the fatigue, the changes in appetite.”
Oh, my God.
The doctor’s mouth keeps moving, shaping around words likeprenatal vitamins,nutrition,follow-up appointments, but I can’t hold on to them. They blur into a low, buzzing drone like someone’s pressed a seashell to my ears and all I can hear is the rush of my own blood.
Maksim.
Oh my God. He has to know. I have to tell him.
The rest of the appointment is a blur.
