Chapter Nineteen
“Come on, you’re going to the doctor,” Sawyer demanded, watching me like I might vomit all over him.
Which, well, was a possibility. I started to object, but he shook his head at me, moving to the kitchen to grab a cleaning bucket from under the kitchen sink, and lining it with a plastic grocery bag before coming back to me with the puke bucket and dragging me onto my feet.
“No. I don’t want to hear it. This is insane.
You need to get on some fluids or something. ”
So we drove to Sawyer’s doctor, me fretting the whole time because I didn’t have medical insurance and I didn’t want to have to sink all my savings into medical bills.
But Sawyer was right. I had been throwing up for two days. I needed to make sure I wasn’t dehydrated.
So we went into the typical doctor’s office, and Sawyer sat in the waiting room while I went into the back, meeting an elderly man with big glasses named Dr. Maddox, who had apparently known Sawyer since he was a little boy and filled me in on a couple anecdotes about him while I got a couple tests run.
If I lived a thousand years, I could never be prepared for the answers.
“Congratulations, Ms. Sweeney,” he said, looking down at his paper in his folder. “You don’t have food poisoning; you have morning sickness.”
“Morning sickness?” I choked out, all the air squeezed from my lungs.
“You’re pregnant.”
“Yeah, no. That’s not possible.”
“Well, even the best birth control is only…”
“No, doctor. I’m not on birth control. I had my tubes tied at eighteen.”
His head snapped up at that, his brows drawing together. Then he reached for my folder again and flipped through my records. “Oh, yes. I see that here.”
“So I can’t be pregnant.”
“But you are.”
“No, that’s just… you need to run another test. Besides, this is too soon for morning sickness, isn’t it? We’ve only been, ah, intimate for a week.”
He paused at that, thinking. “Not necessarily. Most women don’t start until about a month.
But there are many women who swear they knew it the morning after they conceived because they started getting morning sickness.
But let me go find the ultrasound machine.
We can get a clearer idea on your tubal ligation. Maybe it wasn’t done properly.”
A moment later, there was a tap at the door, and Sawyer let himself in. Obviously still clueless about the test results, he froze when he saw my face. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s not food poisoning,” I said past the lump in my throat.
“Okay,” he said, his voice deceptively calm, but everything in him tensed, like he was worried it was cancer or something like that.
“Dr. Maddox went to get an ultrasound machine because he’s worried my tubal ligation might not have been done properly.”
“Your tubal…” he started as he walked toward me. Then it hit him, making him freeze two feet away from the exam table. “You’re pregnant.”
“That’s what the test said.”
He stood there for all of two seconds before he closed the last two feet, sat down beside my hip, and wrapped an arm around me.
“Alright,” he said, squeezing me. “Well, either way, false test result or positive test result, we’ll figure it all out.”
Figure it all out.
We had known each other seventeen days. Seventeen.
We had only been having sex for about ten.
That was just insane. How could anything be figured out?
That wasn’t even taking into consideration that I never wanted to have children, not biological ones anyway.
Suddenly, I felt horrible thinking that with the possibility of one already in me.
But that was how I had always felt. I wanted to adopt.
That was why I made the decision to tie my tubes when I was eighteen.
It had honestly been the easiest decision of my life. It was what I wanted.
And now, more than a decade later, they were going to tell me it wasn’t effective? How was that possible?
“Okay,” Dr. Maddox said as he rolled in the ultrasound machine, an old thing that he must have had lying around for years. “Sawyer,” he said, nodding. “Good. Riya, dear, I will need you to roll up your shirt and roll down your pants and lie back.”
Sawyer gave me another squeeze and moved toward the end of the bed near my head and, once I followed instructions, reached for and grabbed my hand.
The doctor squeezed some freezing jelly on my stomach and pulled out the wand while turning the machine to face him.
Watching him roll that thing around my belly was quite possibly one of the scariest moments of my life.
“Doc,” Sawyer called when he had just been sitting there, squinting at the screen for a long minute. His voice had been firm and impatient, and the doctor’s gaze flew up to his, confused, before he looked over at me.
“Ms. Sweeney, it appears that while you may have had a tubal ligation when you were eighteen, you have since had it reversed.”
“What!” I shrieked, moving to bolt upward, but the doctor’s hand pushed me down as he reached for scratchy paper towels to wipe the jelly off my belly.
I rolled down my shirt and shot up. “I never had it reversed, Dr. Maddox. You have to be wrong. That’s not poss…” my gaze found Sawyer’s, and I saw the truth reflected there.
It was possible.
It was possible because I had no idea what happened to me over the course of a year.
“Oh, God,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands.
Stealing a year of my life was bad enough. But someone had invaded my body, had done things to it without my permission.
The table moved as Sawyer sat down beside me again. But he reached for me and pulled me into his lap, my head tucked under his chin, his arms squeezing me so tight that it was hard to breathe.
“You definitely are pregnant, Ms. Sweeney. For what it’s worth, very newly,” he said, giving me an option I had no idea how I felt about. It had never been a factor in my life.
“How early?” Sawyer asked, and it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about the possibility of it not being his.
“Hard to tell that right now. But, judging by the morning sickness suddenly, just days.”
Okay.
I exhaled slow, the breath coming out shaky.
Alright.
At least it was his.
Not that that was in any way a comfort in and of itself, but at least it wasn’t some random kidnapping psycho’s.
“Thanks, Dr. Maddox,” Sawyer said, somewhat dismissively. “We are just going to keep the room for a few and then we will be out of here. Mail the bill to my address, and I’ll settle it.”
“Okay,” the doctor said, clearly confused and likely thankful for an easy out. “Ms. Sweeney, if you need to come to see me for any reason, please do.”
With that, we were alone.
No silence had ever been so loud before.
“Riya,” Sawyer said a long couple of minutes later. I shook my head, not ready to talk, not knowing what to say. “Riya,” he said, a little more firmly, making me pull back to look up at him. “You’ve made the connection, right?”
The connection to…
Oh, God.
“Michael,” I choked out, feeling sick all over again, but for completely different reasons.
“It’s the only explanation. He could have kept you down. That shit you had in your system, it’s used for lethal injections at high doses. In lower doses, it is used for medically induced comas. He could have untied your tubes. And the hormones in your system…”
“Oh, God,” I squeaked, burying my face in my hands again.
The hormones.
And a reversal of my tubal ligation.
He was trying to get me pregnant while I was unconscious.
“Why?” I said, shaking my head, not understanding.
“He probably snapped, babe,” Sawyer said, his hand rubbing up and down my back. “Lost his wife. Lost you. He had some sort of fucking breakdown. Maybe he thought if he took you and got a baby in you, that he could get you back or some crazy shit like that.”
“Then why drop me off?” I asked, looking over at him. “I wasn’t raped, so he hadn’t even… gotten to the impregnating me part.”
“I don’t have that answer yet, babe, but I swear to fuck, I am going to figure it out.”
I nodded at that, seeing the determination there.
I looked away, blinking at the tears filling my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” he asked, reaching for my chin and forcing me to face him. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“I told you that I couldn’t get pregnant. We decided not to use protection because of that.”
“Right, because you totally should have known your shithead doctor ex would kidnap you, knock you out, and undo your tube tying. How stupid of you to not know that would happen.”
I snorted at that, finding comfort in his gruffness. But the motion made tears slip down from the corners of both eyes.
“Hey,” he said, ducking his head a little, reaching up to swipe the tears away.
“This is not the end of the world, Riya. You have choices. Whichever one you pick, I’ll support you.
If you don’t want to have a baby and you want to get tied again, I’m okay with that.
If you want to have this baby and get tied after?
I’m good with that too. If you want to stay untied and have a dozen little ankle-biters, I can’t say we’re there yet, but I’m open to the idea.
I know this wasn’t what you wanted, but you can still do this or not do this and adopt like you have always wanted.
It fucking sucks that some bastard took this choice away from you, but you are still in control. ”
I swallowed hard and nodded.
He was right.
There was no reason to break into hysterics, though I felt I had definitely earned that right over the past couple of weeks. It would do no good to break down. What I really needed to do was think.
“Remember when we were at Famiglia and I was so against the concept of vigilante justice and street crime?”
“Yeah, babe,” he said, and judging by the way his hand squeezed my knee, he knew where I was going.
“I changed my mind. I want him to pay for this.”
“Good, because I’m the motherfucking debt collector in this scenario.”