“You’re pregnant.”
I stammer, “I… I know what it means.” I nod because that’s what functional adults do in medical offices.
She talks about weeks along, referrals, prenatal vitamins, next steps. Her voice sounds far away. “Based on your dates, you’re about six weeks.”
The timeline matches up with Ireland. The plane. The man who fucked me at thirty thousand feet.
I walk out of the clinic into cold Boston air that feels too sharp against my skin. The world looks exactly the same as it did this morning. Cars move. People talk. Someone laughs across the street.
How is everything still functioning?
I sit on a bench and stare at my hands. Pregnant.
My job is physical. My job is my body. I demonstrate burpees. I spot heavy deadlifts. I push sleds until my clients collapse laughing and gasping.
What happens when I can’t?
What happens when I’m nauseous every morning? When I’m exhausted? When I physically cannot demo what I’m selling?
My brain starts racing ahead to money. Rent. Insurance. Groceries. Diapers. Medical bills. How do you raise a baby alone on commission-based income? How do you raise a baby at all?
And then the worst thought slams into me—should I even keep it?
I don’t go back to the gym.
I text that I’m sick and head home. I rent a tiny cottage in a cluster of them in a quiet part of Boston that no one ever talks about. It’s cheap, it’s clean, and that’s all I really need.
Inside, everything is painfully normal. The couch. The coffee table. The half-folded laundry. My life, sitting exactly where I left it this morning.
Except it isn’t.
I sit on the couch and press my palms into my eyes. Option one: I don’t keep it. The thought feels like swallowing glass. Clinical. Logical. I’m twenty-five. I don’t have a partner. I don’t have family nearby. My entire career depends on stamina and flexibility.
No one would blame me.
Option two: I keep it. Raise a baby alone. My chest tightens so hard I feel dizzy. I’ve been thinking about transitioning to online training for months. Less physical demand. More scalable income.
Leigh keeps offering to build me a website. “You need digital infrastructure,” she says. “Not just in-person hours.” Being in cybersecurity and having started in website design, she’s my go-to for all things online. We met thanks to her renting the cottage next door. She’s become my best friend in the past three years.
But even a website feels impossible right now.
What if I’m too sick to film workouts? What if I’m too tired to coach? What if I can’t recover physically after birth? What if I lose clients?
What if I resent the baby?
The thought makes my stomach flip harder than the nausea did. I press my hand against my stomach, though there’s nothing to feel yet. Duh.
But it’s there. Ronan doesn’t know. I don’t even know how to find him. He said he lived in Boston. No number. No “let’s stay in touch.”
That was what I wanted. It was supposed to be one extraordinary, reckless memory. Now it feels like the beginning of something I don’t know how to survive.
This isn’t the end of the world. I’m not a teenager. It feels like the end of the world, but I can figure this out.
I don’t know if I want to tell Ronan. I bet I could track him down somehow, but I don’t know if I want to complicate his life. I don’t know if I want him involved.
I don’t know anything. I feel like I can’t breathe. The cottage feels suffocating.
I lie on my bed staring at the ceiling, my hand resting flat over my stomach. Six weeks. There might already be a heartbeat. Well, a cardiac signal people call a heartbeat. There’s not even an actual heart yet—that doesn’t exist for months. But the start of cardiac tissue is there at six weeks.
