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I placed all three on the bathroom counter, set a timer on my phone, and tried not to watch them develop.

I washed my hands twice, straightened bottles that didn’t need straightening, wiped an already-clean section of counter, and finally walked into the bedroom because standing over those tests was making the longest three minutes of my life feel even longer.

When my timer went off, I almost didn’t go back inside.

I stood in the doorway of the bathroom with my heart pounding against my ribs.

“Okay, Lakelyn. Either you’re pregnant by a dead man or your period is late. Those are apparently the choices life has given you.”

That sounded even crazier out loud.

I walked to the counter.

The first test was positive.

I sighed in disbelief.

My attention moved to the second.

Positive.

Then the third.

Positive.

For several seconds, I didn’t move.

There was no screaming, no immediate laughter, and nobody beside me to react first. I simply stood there with one hand over my mouth, staring at three positive pregnancy tests while my brain tried to force the sight in front of me into something that made sense.

It couldn’t.

Then my eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, my God.”

I picked up the first test and inspected it as though another line might disappear if I stared hard enough. It didn’t… neither did the lines on the other two.

I was pregnant again with Caspian’s baby.

A broken laugh escaped me before the tears did, and once they started, I couldn’t stop them.

I wasn’t crying because I didn’t want the baby… I did. Once the shock wore off, I wanted her more than I could explain. I just needed somebody to tell me how the hell my dead fiancé had gotten me pregnant.

I lowered myself onto the edge of the bathtub and pressed one hand against my stomach, even though there was nothing to feel yet.

The first time I found out I was carrying Caspian’s child, he had disappeared from my life before I ever got the chance to tell him. Now years later, I was sitting in the same kind of impossible moment with another baby growing inside me. Except that time, their father was around, and I would get to tell him myself.

I sat there for several minutes laughing and crying at the same time, staring at those tests, and occasionally shaking my head because apparently my life had reached the point where pregnant by my ghost fiancé was an actual sentence I could say and mean.

Eventually, I wiped my face and checked the time.

Sunset was still a few hours away.

I could call his name and have him standing in front of me before then, but once I told him, I wanted his arms around me. For that conversation, seeing and hearing him wasn’t going to be enough.

I picked up the tests, arranged all three neatly across the counter, then smiled through the tears that refused to completely stop.

“Alright, Caspian Black,” I murmured. “Let’s see what smart shit you got to say about this.”