Page 169 of Slapshot Baby

For the first time in a long while, everything feels exactly where it belongs.

I can picture her under the water while the shower runs, my shirt discarded on the tile, steam filling the bathroom.

I'm smiling my first real smile in days.

Her phone vibrates on the coffee table.

The screen lights up. A notification banner slides across the top, and I glance at it without thinking

Incoming Call: Dr. Fernandez OB-GYN

My stomach drops. Sudden cold, like stepping through ice into black water, runs through my body.

OB-GYN. I know what those letters stand for.

The phone vibrates again. Again. Then it stops. A voicemail notification slides onto the screen.

I pick up the phone. My hand feels like it belongs to someone else. I tap the voicemail.

It’s an automated voice: "This is a courtesy reminder for Ava Hartley. Your appointment with Dr. Fernandez is confirmed for Thursday at ten a.m. If you need to reschedule your prenatal visit, please call our office at..."

I pull the phone from my ear.

Prenatal.

The word sits in the air like a grenade with the pin already pulled. My legs move to the room without my brain registering the movement.

The shower is still running. Steam curls under the bathroom door.

My hand is holding Ava's phone in a grip tight enough to crack the case.

Prenatal visit.

The memory surfaces like a body breaking water. The dream I've had for weeks about Ava beneath me, her eyes wide, our fingers interlocked on a mattress. My voice saying keep your eyes open.

And then, the thing I kept dismissing as imagination: the torn condom.

The condom that broke the night of the gala.

I count backward. My lips move without sound. Months. The timeline unspools in my chest like barbed wire.

She was already pregnant when she came to the hospital. She was pregnant when she brought me the succulent and told me to get better. Pregnant when she proposed friendship, kissed me and ran. Pregnant when she reorganized my apartment and sat on my kitchen floor and scrolled through my phone looking for memories I couldn't find.

The baby was inside her when she said yes to fake dating. Yes to the lake house. Yes to being my girlfriend.

Pregnant every single time she touched her stomach and changed the subject. Every time she steered my hands away from her belly during sex, used sex positions that now made sense for a woman with a baby growing inside her tummy.

Pregnant every time she said I'm fine with that smile that never quite reached her eyes.

The curves I held, the fullness of her breasts, the softness above her hips… the… the warmth radiating from her skin that I traced with my fingers and called beautiful.

My baby has been growing inside her while she’s been lying in my bed, laughing at my jokes, and letting me fall in love with her without saying a word.

Or could it be that the baby is not mine? That she got pregnant for another?

I cringe.

No. Ava's not like that.