Hannah pulls on her leggings with her back to me while I stare at this monochrome image in my hands. My kid. Inside there. Growing. No idea who he is or what’s waiting for him out here. Just this little gooey thing that’s about to change our lives forever.
“What do you want to do?” she repeats, slowly turning to face me. Her green eyes are lined with fatigue.
My head starts spinning. How the hell am I going to keep this kid alive? Who in their right mind would trust me with a living thing entirely dependent on me for its survival? Not to mention not royally screwing him up emotionally.
“Fine, I guess I’ll go first.”
As my mind races in a thousand directions, Hannah’s voice cuts in and out. I vaguely hear her saying something about me being gone during the season.
“I’m not thrilled about the idea of being home all alone, raising a baby by myself.”
Everything suddenly feels urgent. A loud clock ticking down to the enormity of this new reality. A baby. Our child. How do they just let people have these things? I failed the written portion of my first driver’s test, for fuck’s sake.
“It’s intimidating,” she’s saying. “I’m not sure if I’m ready to handle that, you know? Like it’s a lot. Especially without any family support…”
I start doing math in my head. Thinking about pre-season and doctor visits. Traveling to away games. The baby coming in the middle of the run-up to the playoffs. As panic starts churning in my gut, I wish I had a functional family to tell me how I’m supposed to do all this stuff. Someone to teach me.
“Okay then, apparently I’m talking to myself. Let’s go.”
My head snaps up, jolting me back to the present. Hannah’s standing at the door with her purse. I’m still clutching this picture in my hand, daunted.
Hannah is upset with me, and now I feel like a total dick for getting into a fight with her on the way over. My system just didn’t know how to process all that information at once, and I’m a little burnt out, if I’m honest.
“I’m sorry. I’m just…” I trail off.
“Let’s go,” she says again, turning away from me.
Although it’s early evening when we get home, Hannah says we can talk in the morning and goes right to bed. Rather than follow her, I sit at the kitchen table with a beer, staring at my kid. Wondering what he’d think of me. Or she. Could be a girl. But knowing my luck, it’s a boy. A son who’ll unearth all my daddy issues and make me doubt every parenting move I make, for fear of screwing him up. I sit there for hours, imagining all those ways I could mess up, and wake up an exhausted mess the next morning, having barely slept.
Hannah’s still withdrawn as we brush our teeth beside each other at the sink. I want to fix it, but when I shut the water and open my mouth to speak, she leaves the bathroom abruptly. While I’m making coffee in the kitchen, she just sits at the counter eating a piece of toast, watching me. The silence is making the back of my neck itch. Again, I’m about to speak, when her phone rings and she wanders into the den to answer it. I don’t catch much of the conversation over the bubbling of the coffeemaker. I peek around the corner to see her write a number down on a pad of paper.
“What was that?” I ask when she returns to the kitchen to finish her breakfast.
Hannah shrugs, not meeting my eyes. “Nothing.” She shoves the last piece of toast in her mouth, chewing quickly as she grabs her purse and keys from the side table across the room.
I feel a pang of alarm. “Where are you going?”
“I need to get some stuff from the studio if I’m going to work from home for the next few days.”
“You want me to drive you?” I offer.
“No.” She ducks into the hallway toward the door, answering over her shoulder. “I’m fine.”
Yeah, right. She’s far from fine. It’s like she can’t wait to get away from me. Granted, I was sort of an ass yesterday, but we’ve got a pretty serious conversation to have. I’d be happy to apologize if she’d stand still long enough to hear it.
After I eat some breakfast and put away the dishes, I give Logan a call. My best friend is hit-or-miss when it comes to giving advice, but God help me, I’m desperate.
“Hey, G,” he says. “Good timing. I just got back from the craziest lunch with Grace and her mom. Josie took us to a café near the Eiffel Tower where all the waitstaff were—not shitting you here—goddamn mimes. Can you imagine a worse nightmare scenario?”
“Hannah’s pregnant.”
That stuns him into silence.
“Wait, I just realized how that sounds,” I interject before he can reply. “I’m not using that as an example of a nightmare scenario. I just needed to say it and didn’t want to hear your stupid mime story anymore.”
“First of all, wow.”
“I know, right?” I rake my free hand through my hair. “She totally threw me a curveball yesterday.”
“I meant wow, my story wasn’t stupid.”
I can’t help but snort.
“Second of all,” he continues. “Wow.”
A full-blown laugh slips out. I know it’s not the time to be laughing, but I love my friends. They never fail to lift my spirits when I need their support.
“Is this wow about my news?”
“Yeah. I mean, holy shit, G. Congratulations. How far along is she?”
“Ten weeks. She had the first ultrasound yesterday. Actually, that’s sort of how I found out. She wasn’t feeling well and thought she was losing the baby. Had to rush her to the hospital.”
“Oh, damn. I’m sorry. She okay?”
“Yeah, better now. False alarm. But I had no idea.” Shame coats my throat. “I was in the middle of this god-awful joint interview with my father when Wellsy called, so I was already in a crap mood. Then she dropped all this on me at once, and I, uh…” The remorse is choking me now. I clear my throat. “I didn’t react well.”
His voice turns grave. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing. Well, I mean, we got into a shouting match in the car, and I may or may not have compared her to my father.”
Logan’s expletive thuds in my ear. “Not cool, dude. You can’t be yelling at pregnant ladies.”
“Yes, thank you. But I was caught off guard.”
I pace around the house, trying to walk off the nervous energy building in my muscles.
“You better do some serious groveling,” he advises me. “Bust out that credit card and get to work.”
“She’s pretty mad still. We were supposed to talk, but she basically blew me off this morning.”
“Well, yeah, dickhead. She’s been all alone in this, and then she’s freaking out, tells you, and you flip out on her and tell her she’s like your dad? Your dad, who was spawned from Satan’s rib? Jesus, bro. She’s feeling like shit right about now, and you made it so much worse.”
He’s right. I know. As he rails into me for my behavior, I wander into the den and notice the notepad Wellsy had written on. I don’t even mean to read it. I just happen to glance at it and the name catches my attention.
Reed Realty.
I freeze in place. What the hell does Hannah need a realtor for? And when did she even have a chance to contact one? She went straight to bed when we got home yesterday—
—at six o’clock in the evening, I realize. And I sat in the kitchen alone for hours, lost in my own damned head while my pregnant girlfriend was in the bedroom. Maybe she hadn’t gone to sleep, but stayed up for a while. Also stewing, thinking. And maybe she’d stewed and thought until she’d reached a decision.
To move out.
My blood runs cold with terror. She did just receive that big royalty check. She sure as hell doesn’t need me to support her and the baby. And after the way I lost it on her yesterday, maybe she doesn’t want my support.
Fuck.
My body growing weak, I cut Logan off midsentence. “Dude, I gotta go.”
