Chapter 3
I haven't looked at the screenshot since Monday night.
That's not quite true. I looked at it once more — the logo on the coffee cup is a circle with what might be a bird inside it. Or a leaf. Or nothing. Too blurry to mean anything.
And then I put my phone away and decided: this is grief. This is my broken brain looking for betrayal because betrayal is easier to feel than loss. I know this about myself. It's why I'm good at my job. It's also why I go to therapy.
So. The blanket. The tissue paper. The ribbon. I drive to Jordan's apartment.
* * *
She opens the door in sweatpants and one of those oversized t-shirts that says something ironic — this one says DELICATE FLOWER in block letters. Her hair is up. No makeup. She looks tired and happy and exactly like herself.
"You didn't have to," she says when she sees the bag.
"Shut up. Open it."
We sit on her couch. She pulls the blanket out and makes the sound — the soft, involuntary intake that means something landed. She holds it against her face the same way I did in the store.
"Chloe. This is beautiful."
"The woman knits them by hand. Each one takes like two weeks."
"I'm going to cry."
"You're allowed. Hormones."
She laughs. Wipes her eyes. Folds the blanket carefully back into the tissue paper like she's already preserving it. And for a moment — a real, uncomplicated moment — I'm just here. With my friend. Doing the thing friends do.
"How are you feeling?" I ask. "Still nauseous?"
"Less this week. But exhausted. Like, bone-tired. I fell asleep at 8 PM last night watching a cooking show. I didn't even finish the episode."
"That's completely normal for the end of your first trimester. Your progesterone is doing exactly what it's supposed to."
"See, this is why I need you." She tucks her feet under herself, shifts to face me fully. "Everyone else just says 'get rest' or 'eat crackers.' You actually explain the science."
"It's what I do."
"Do you ever bring work home?" she asks, pulling at a thread on the throw pillow. "Like, files or access stuff? I feel like your job is so intense — I'd never be able to leave it at the door."
"Not really. Everything's on-site — the specimens, the equipment. My badge doesn't even work if I take it more than a floor away from where it's supposed to be." I laugh. "It's like working in a vault."
"That makes sense." She nods, idle, already moving on. "I could never do what you do. The pressure."
"It keeps me busy." I shrug. And then the conversation moves on the way conversations do — sliding past something without noticing it was there.
She pauses. Takes a breath. "I want to ask you something, and you can totally say no."
"Okay."
"Will you be at the birth?"
My hands still. Both of them, just — stop. The blanket bag is in my lap and my fingers freeze around its handles.
"You don't have to," she says quickly. "I know it's a lot.
I know this whole thing is — I know it's complicated for you.
But you're the only person I'd want there.
My mom is... my mom. And Tyler is great but he faints at blood and honestly I need someone who knows what's happening. Medically. You know?"
I look at her face. Open. Vulnerable. Asking.
"Of course," I say. "Yes. Of course I'll be there."
She grabs me. Hugs me so hard I can feel the bump — barely there, just a firmness where there didn't used to be. She's warm. She smells like jasmine again. And I'm holding my best friend and saying yes to something I should be saying yes to, because this is who I am. This is who I choose to be.
Three pats on her back before I let go.
* * *
"So tell me about Tyler," I say, settling back into the couch. "How's he handling it?"
"He's sweet. Nervous. He keeps buying books. Like, actual physical books from the bookstore about what to expect. He's got a stack on his nightstand that's taller than his lamp."
"That's a good sign."
"It is. He's good." She says it firmly. Like she's convincing herself, or maybe just reinforcing it. "He's really good."
"And his family? Do they know?"
"His mom. She cried. Good tears." Jordan picks at the edge of a throw pillow. "We'll tell everyone else after the anatomy scan."
"Smart. Twenty weeks is a good milestone."
There's a pause. Comfortable enough. The cooking show she fell asleep to is still paused on her TV — a woman mid-whisk, frozen. The afternoon light comes through the window in that golden, angled way that means it's later than I think.
"Jordan," I say. And I don't plan what comes next. It just comes. "When did you and Tyler actually get together?"
She looks at me. "What do you mean?"
"Like — when did you start dating. Officially."
"I told you. July. The barbecue."
"Right. The barbecue. But had you guys been talking before that? Like, was there a thing before the thing?"
She tilts her head. The smallest crease between her eyebrows. "Why?"
Because a baby conceived in early June can't belong to a man you met in July. Because I do this math every single day. Because conception dates are not flexible — they are not approximations — they are biological facts measured in millimeters of crown-rump length on an ultrasound screen.
"Just curious," I say. "Sometimes people have a thing before the thing. I was just wondering if that's what happened."
Jordan tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Three seconds of silence.
"We'd been texting for a bit before," she says. "A mutual friend gave him my number in, like, May? June? I don't remember exactly. But we didn't meet in person until the barbecue."
"Okay." I smile. "That makes sense."
It doesn't. Texting doesn't make a baby. But she offered it — the bridge between the dates — and I can walk across it or I can stand here on my side and stare at the gap underneath.
I choose to walk.
"He seems great," I say. "I'm glad you're happy."
"I am." She puts her hand on the bump again. That instinct. That protective curve. "I really am."
"And the clinic — they screened everything? Medical history, genetic panels?"
Jordan picks at the throw pillow fringe. "Yeah. Full panel. Everything clean."
"Anonymous or open donor?"
"Anonymous. The kid can access records at eighteen, but I didn't want some guy showing up with opinions about parenting."
"Smart. And they did IUI or ICI?"
She blinks. "What's the difference?"
"IUI is intrauterine — catheter, done in the clinic. ICI is intracervical — simpler, can be done at home with a syringe."
"Oh. Um — the first one. The clinic one."
She said that too fast. A woman who was actually inseminated at a clinic remembers the catheter. Remembers the stirrups and the speculum and the ten minutes lying flat afterward. She doesn't say "um" and pick from multiple choice.
"Great," I say. "Better success rate anyway."
Jordan smiles. Relieved. Changing the subject — reaching for the remote, asking if I want to watch something. And I let her. I let the conversation move on because I've gotten what I came for.
Not answers. Questions. Better questions than the ones I walked in with.
* * *
I drive home with the radio off. The city moves past me — stoplights, pedestrians, a man walking a dog that's too big for him, a kid on a skateboard cutting through a parking lot.
Normal things. Tuesday things. The sun is dropping and the light is golden and forgiving, the way it only gets in the hour before dark.
My phone is in my bag on the passenger seat. The screenshot is in my photos. The coffee cup with the logo I can't read. The dates that don't line up. The bridge Jordan built with the word "texting" — as if texting in May explains a pregnancy in June.
I could let this go. I could decide, right now, that I'm done. That the explanation is good enough. That the small inconsistencies are just the way people tell stories — imprecise, rounded, approximate. Not everyone tracks time the way I do. Not everyone counts.
At a red light, I pick up my phone. Open the screenshot.
The logo I already identified yesterday — Wren & Co.
, 5th Avenue, Nashville. The date. And now — the fumbled answer about IUI.
Three data points, all converging on the same impossible conclusion.
My thumb hovers over the delete button. I don't press it.
The light turns green. Someone honks behind me. I put my phone down and drive.
Three blocks. Three left turns. Three minutes in my driveway with the engine running and my hands on the wheel and the knowledge settling into me like contrast dye into a vein — slow, illuminating, impossible to remove once it's in.
Jordan was in Nashville.
And I don't know what that means yet. But my body knows. My body — which has failed me in every reproductive way possible — knows something my brain is still refusing to name.
I turn off the engine. Go inside. Ryan is cooking dinner. He's making pasta, the simple one, garlic and olive oil and whatever's in the fridge. He looks up and smiles.
"How was Jordan?"
"Good," I say. "She loved the blanket."
"Good."
I watch him stir. The wooden spoon moving through the pan. The olive oil sizzling. A normal man making a normal dinner on a normal Tuesday. Garlic browning — that smell that means home, that means evening, that means another day survived. My husband. Who was in Nashville the first week of June.
"Ryan," I say.
"Yeah?"
I open my mouth. The question is right there — three words away from detonation. But if I ask and the answer is what I think it might be, then this kitchen, this pasta, this life — all of it becomes before. And I'm not ready for after.
I close it.
"Nothing. Smells great."
He nods. Goes back to stirring.
I sit down at the kitchen table and I count the tiles on the backsplash. Three rows of twelve. Thirty-six tiles. I count them again. Three rows of twelve. Thirty-six. I count them a third time because if I'm counting tiles I'm not asking the question that's building in my throat like bile.
Was she there. Was she with you. Is that baby yours.
I don't ask.
Not yet.