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I glare at him. For a whole entire minute. He don’t move. He don’t even blink. I swear this man could out-stare a cat.

So I pee on three of them at once, while that man watches me, and I cuss him out the whole time. Three sticks. Both hands. Like I’m playing the drums. This is not how I pictured this. In my head, it was always gonna be me and Tasha in a Target bathroom, screaming. Not me squatting over a toilet that probably costs more than Mama’s car, with a Russian gangster in the doorway like a prison guard.

I put them on the counter in a row. Face down. I’m not looking. I’m not.

I wash my hands. I sit on the edge of the tub. I twist that stupid ring around and around my finger.

Three minutes.

Lord. Three minutes. I’ve waited on financial aid for three months, and this is worse.

Okay. Okay, Dylan. Think. What if it’s yes?

I’m twenty-two. I just finished my finals. I got grad school applications due in two weeks. I’m supposed to be somebody’s professor one day, walking around with a tote bag and reading glasses, scaring freshmen. I’m not supposed to be somebody’s mama. Not yet. Not like this. Not with a man who put a ring on me while I was knocked out and changed the locks on my whole life.

And what if it’s no?

My stomach drops. Not the good way.

Wait. Why did my stomach do that?

Why does no feel worse?

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Girl, no. You do not want this man’s baby. You do not.

I look up at him.

He’s not leaning anymore. He’s standing up straight in that doorway, arms at his sides, both hands in fists. His jaw’s so tight I can see a muscle jumping. He’s not looking at the tests. He’s looking at me. My face. My hands. My stomach under his T-shirt. Like if he looks hard enough, he can see straight through me.

He looks like a man about to kill somebody.

And my stupid heart’s going boom, boom, boom, and it’s not ‘cause I’m scared of him.

I want it.

Oh my God. I want it.

My phone timer goes off.

I almost jump out my skin. Neither of us moves.

“You look,” I whisper. “I can’t. You look.”

He walks to the counter. He looks down.

He doesn’t say anything.

He doesn’t say anything, and he’s taking way too long, and I’m about to throw up on his marble.

Then he turns around, and I can’t read his face, I can’t read nothing on it, and he crosses that whole bathroom in two steps and picks me up off the tub by my waist and sets me on the counter. Right next to the tests. And pulls his T-shirt off over my head.

“Sasha… Wait… What does it say? Sasha, what does it say…”

He puts his hand on my stomach.

Flat. Spread wide. His whole big hand covering my belly, his thumb rubbing slow under my belly button. He’s staring at it. At his hand on me. Like he’s trying to see through my skin.

And I know. Before I even look. I know from his hand.