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No, no, no. No. Panic set in again for the millionth time, creeping up my spine and making me feel as if I was sinking into the concrete beneath my aching feet. “Fuck,” I said, pushing the hair out of my face as if it would help me think clearer. “Fuck!”
Adrian’s jaw ticked again as he watched me, not making a single move in my direction. This didn’t make sense.
“Why?” I asked, my fingers catching on a knot and pulling regardless, making little blossoms of pain sprout from my scalp. “I don’t understand, why?”
A flicker of something rippled across his face, but it was too quick, too small to decipher. “I was hoping you’d tell me that, Ava.”
What? I opened my mouth to speak, but the words were trapped again, locked behind the building lump in my throat that I was so, so tired of.
“Thought so.”
“I didn’t…” I cut myself off as the words ran out, wracking my brain for more, for anything. How could he think I’d done this? “I didn’t tell him, Adrian. I didn’t.”
He shook his head, his lips forming a tight line. “Who else would have?”
“I…I don’t know. Maybe he asked for my discharge paperwork, maybe he worked it out…”
“You’re an adult, Ava,” he scoffed. “He can’t just ask them for that. That would be a fucking HIPAA violation.”
He stretched his neck from side to side, his eyes glazing over as he looked anywhere but at me.
“You told him. You conveniently left out the pregnancy, but you didn’t consider the consequences for me.”
A ringing started in my ears, loud enough it felt as though it blocked almost everything out—but I could hear him breathing, could hear the thunder of my own heartbeat, could hear his sigh as I struggled to find words to say. I hadn’t done this.
I fished my phone from my pocket and hastily pulled up my texts with my dad. I hadn’t gone into a fugue state and dropped that bombshell, I was goddamn sure of it.
I pressed my phone into his chest. “Look,” I croaked. “Just look. I didn’t. You can go through my whole fucking phone if you want to, Adrian.”
He sighed as his hand covered mine, peeling back the screen from his jacket. He glanced down at it, his mouth scrunching up on one side for a second. “This means nothing when it could have been a phone call or a chat in person.”
“You think I wouldn’t have warned you?”
“I think you tried.” He tapped on my screen a handful of times before turning my phone around, pointing out the last message I sent him.
Me: Can we please talk?
“That was an hour before David called me,” he clarified.
I stared at the text, trying not to look at the last one above it from him that simply said,I miss you. “I…I wanted to talk to you about where we were at and how we were going to tell my dad…”
“So you told him yourself when I didn’t reply.”
“No,” I snapped. The feelings from his insistence that I was lying were morphing from horror to irritation, and it was getting hard to keep myself from lashing out and screaming at him for even entertaining this idea. “Do you honestly believe that if I’d done that in person, I’d have been let out of his sight within an hour? Do you think that if I’d called him, he wouldn’t have immediately come to my apartment? How would that have worked, Adrian?”
“You could have told him earlier. Yesterday. I don’t fucking know, Ava, I just know that there is no one else who knew enough about what this was for him to have found it out,” he said, his shoulders rising and falling in defeat.
But it was what he’d said in the middle of that last sentence that I latched onto in panic.
…who knew enough about what this was…
…what this was…
…was…
Was.
I choked on the only word I could focus on. “Was?”
