CHAPTER SEVEN
Leanne
Six Weeks Later
“Holy shit.” The whispered words disappear into the void, not even reaching the white walls to reverberate back to me.
The white-and-grey marble countertop of my bathroom is littered with the remains of my spontaneous run to the store.
Three boxes and six blue-and-white sticks—all displaying the same eight-letter word.
Pregnant.
“Holy shit,” I say again.
I pick up each test in turn, as if the results will change if I blink, or look away, or shake it like an eight-ball. They’re all resolutely the same after my inspection, the grey display screen and the small black letters.
I cover my mouth and stifle a sound that’s somewhere between a sob and a laugh.
Is this really happening?
My gaze tracks over the tests again.
Yes, it’s really happening.
I squeeze my eyes shut as the first tear rolls down my cheek, finding the corner of my mouth and leaving a salty residue behind.
My belief that I’d get to experience pregnancy was ripped from me months and months ago. The irony of spending the last six weeks finally dealing with that hurt—with that loss—only to be slapped with this reality, is not lost on me. It’s like being given a gift I was told was never meant for me.
I took the singular box of tests—leftover from before—out from the medicine cabinet this morning knowing it was impossible… But then they were both positive. A result I refused to believe, blaming the date on the box showing they’d expired two months ago.
I pushed them aside, along with the reluctant hope growing in my gut.
When I threw up again—the initial reason I even considered taking them—I made a hasty trip to Walmart to buy two more boxes and a bottle of Sprite.
I had the entire bottle chugged by the time I got home… and then I peed on four more sticks. Each one displaying the same result in much less time than the directions required.
Pregnant.
I sit on the lip of the bathtub and stare at the test cradled in my hands, the reality finally dawning on me in the same way the sun crests the mountains surrounding Bozeman every morning.
I’m thirty-seven years old and pregnant for the first time in my life.
I’m also single and don’t even have a phone number for the man I’ve spent six weeks trying to forget.
A man I should’ve been glad never to see again. A man I should’ve never slept with. A man who saw me that night in a way that no one around me had for quite some time. A man whose face has drifted through my consciousness way too often since I left Monarch Ranch without so much as a goodbye.
Fuck me.
I tip my head back on a sigh, sending my inner ear into a tailspin and landing me with a thud in the empty bathtub.
“Ow,” I whine, turning onto my side and hoping the dizzy spell will lift. If it doesn’t, the nausea is sure to be close at hand, and I’ll be scrambling out of this bathtub faster than my tired body wants to move.
I’ve spent the past five days alternating between the bed and the cold floor beside the toilet.
I’ve never been so sick. That was the first red flag.
The second was that I couldn’t remember when my last period was.
In and of itself, that isn’t particularly alarming—I’ve never been regular—but combined with the sickness, dizziness, and fatigue…
It was enough to have me reaching for those tests when I was still sick this morning.
I close my eyes and inhale deeply, my fingers finding their way to splay against my flat stomach. There’s an energy beneath my palm that didn’t exist a few hours ago; a connection to something—someone—that leaves me forever changed even now.
With a heavy exhale, I melt into my new reality.
Tomorrow I’ll figure out what happens next—how to tell Bryce, how to move forward.
But today I’m going to bask in the truth that this is real, that this is happening, that I’m going to be a mom.
Or I will, as soon as I’m done throwing up… again.