Chapter 7 #2
Sutton pointed at her and said, “Guh!”
“I’ll be right back.” Chloe set Sutton on Presley’s lap, hung the baby bag over her chair back, and went off for a high chair.
Sutton stared at me curiously, so I shot her a smile. “I’m Rowan. I met you at your mommy and daddy’s work. Your outfit is adorable.”
Sutton held out both arms to me.
Presley’s mouth gaped open. “You want Rowan instead of me? I’m shattered!” She winked at me as the little girl, unbothered, leaned toward me.
When I made room, Presley transferred Sutton to my lap.
“Hi, cutie pie.” I pressed a kiss to the top of her head, hugged her, then handed her my spoon when she pointed at it.
“You’re a natural,” Presley said. “You’ll make a great mom someday.”
I forced my brain to skip over that comment entirely and changed the subject.
“Tell me about your house,” I said.
Before she could say anything, Bria served us our entrees.
My southern shrimp and grits had sounded so good when I’d ordered it, but now my stomach churned.
My appetite had been wonky for months, likely due to stress.
Lately it’d gotten worse rather than better though, with food bringing on a wave of nausea more often than not.
It didn’t make sense, but then I knew grief could mess a body up just as much as stress.
Chloe returned, and we settled Sutton in her high chair then started into our meals. I took several small bites of grits, thinking getting something in my empty stomach would calm its uneasiness.
“God, this is good,” Presley said of her beer-battered walleye. “You might’ve married the wrong Henry brother, Chloe.”
Chloe laughed. “Cash is a good chef, but Holden’s my soul mate.”
“When’s Ava due?” I asked of Cash’s wife, the inn owner who’d been so welcoming from that very first night.
“In March. She’s got about six weeks left,” Chloe said.
“As long as her husband doesn’t stop cooking for me,” Presley said, grinning. Then her expression turned to a frown. “Chlo, favor to ask. Can I sleep on your sofa tonight? I’m thinking another drink would help dull the crampiness.”
“Bad periods?” I asked, able to relate to that with every fiber of my being.
“She gets horrible ones,” Chloe said. “For as long as I’ve known her.”
“I have endometriosis,” Presley said as she picked up her drink.
“I do too,” I said.
“It’s a big bag of suckage,” Presley said. “Do you have pain in between periods too?”
“Yessss. Like, eighty percent of the time.” I set my fork down hard once the words were out of my mouth, struck by a realization.
“Are you okay?” Chloe asked me, watching me closely.
I glanced up at her, my mind spinning. “Yeah. I just…” I shook my head. “I just realized I haven’t had that pain since I’ve lived here. Three weeks. That’s unheard of.”
“That’s wonderful,” Chloe said.
“It’s…unusual, but I’ll take it,” I said.
“Any chance you could be pregnant?” Presley asked. “One of my colleagues has endo pretty bad, but when she was pregnant, the pain went away.”
The bite I’d just swallowed nearly came back up. “N-no,” I said automatically. I tried to remember the date, did the math. Twenty-three days since New Year’s, but… “No.”
I met the gazes of both women, who were watching me with concern.
“Are you sure?” Presley asked.
I picked up my napkin and nervously wiped my mouth as I considered telling them more.
It’d been a while since I’d had girlfriends on a confiding level.
I’d had several at my teaching job, but we’d gradually lost touch once I quit and wasn’t able to meet them for happy hours or movie nights.
With a slow, shaky breath, I realized how much I’d missed that kind of connection.
“My ob-gyn said my odds of ever having children are tiny unless I have a procedure,” I said quietly.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Chloe said, looking genuinely upset for me.
Presley tilted her head. “There’s still a chance, you know? If you were with someone…”
My insides fluttered nervously. I blurted out, “I had a fling on New Year’s Eve.” I could tell them that much, but no way would I reveal who I’d been with.
I could tell they were calculating the weeks.
“Totally possible,” Presley said.
“But so improbable.” I couldn’t think straight. My brain was stuttering along, trying to imagine. In the year plus I’d been with Christian, there’d been no pregnancy scares despite us being careless with birth control.
I’d been devastated by my doctor’s prognosis.
I’d always wanted to have babies. When I’d pictured my future, the husband’s face was blurry and unclear, but there were kids in the equation every time.
Yes, I’d likely have the procedure eventually to increase my odds, but the question remained whether my body would cooperate with my dream of being a mom.
If one hundred women had the same prognosis, a handful of us could end up pregnant.
What if one of them was me?
No, surely not. It would be the worst timing ever. I’d just started adjusting to being responsible only for me after neglecting myself for so long. This was my healing phase, my refinding myself era. For me to be pregnant would be the utmost in irony ever.
That aside, if by some long-shot, miraculous act of the universe I was pregnant, the circumstances were so not ideal.
A one-night stand with a man I barely knew, who apparently had his hands full with a teenage daughter and wanted nothing to do with me beyond working together.
And me, a tangle of grief, soul-deep fatigue, and emotional vulnerability. In other words, a verifiable shit show.
“Do you want to take a test?” Chloe asked with so much empathy in her tone I could cry.
God. A pregnancy test. I’d never needed one before. I wasn’t convinced I needed one now.
“Do you think that’s premature?” I asked.
“Not if it happened New Year’s Eve.” Presley squeezed my wrist lightly. “It’s whatever you’re comfortable with, hon. But if it were me, I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew one way or the other.”
“Do you have any other symptoms?” Chloe asked.
I met her eyes as it hit me that, yes, I did. “Nausea.”
Presley sucked in an audible breath.
There was almost no part of me that really thought I could be pregnant.
I’d made peace with the odds, mostly, at least until I had the procedure.
Or maybe I just hadn’t had any bandwidth to think about it for ages.
Pregnancy wasn’t on my radar. This was likely something else, which led to scarier questions.
What could be wrong with my body now? Maybe that seemed pessimistic, but I’d struggled with pain for so long that it seemed a lot more logical than being pregnant.
“It’s not too early to test?” I asked, understanding that ruling out pregnancy was my first step.
“Not at all,” Chloe said, breaking up another of her daughter’s chicken fingers into bite-sized pieces. “A little advice though… If you want to avoid gossip, I wouldn’t recommend buying tests at the Country Market. People will find out fast.”
Right. Because I was living and working in a small town now.
“I could go buy some,” Presley said. “They can speculate all they want about me.”
“No need,” Chloe said. “I have at least two unused tests at home. They’re yours. If you want moral support, you can test at my house. Holden’s out for the evening.”
I inhaled slowly, trying to settle myself down as I looked from Chloe to Presley. “If I’m not pregnant, and I honestly don’t think I am, then something weird is going on. So…yeah. I’ll take you up on that.”
I couldn’t pass up the offer of moral support and girlfriends who’d help me through, whatever the results ended up being.