What We Kept In The Dark

I’m on the phone with Reina telling her about the new bookstore that opened downtown when Doctor Kent walks in carrying a manila folder.

“Hey, the doctor just walked in,” I say into the phone. “Let me call you back.”

“Okay babe, let me know what she says,” Reina says, and I can hear traffic in the background on her end.

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

I hang up and Doctor Kent settles into the chair across from me without looking up from whatever’s written in that folder, and there’s something about the way she’s holding herself that makes my palms start sweating.

“Miss Lancelin,” she says finally, still not meeting my eyes. “Your test results came back.”

“Okay.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel.

She looks up then, and I see it in her face before she even opens her mouth—whatever she’s about to say is going to change everything.

“You’re pregnant.”

The words hit me like cold water and for a second I think I misheard her, think maybe she said something else entirely.

I laugh, this sharp sound that doesn’t belong to me.

“No, that’s—that’s not possible.” I say, my voice barely steady.

“Almost twelve weeks,” she says, and her voice has gone soft now like she’s talking to something breakable. “Congratulations.”

Twelve weeks.

Three months.

Ryan left on a business trip three months ago and I haven’t seen him since.

“There has to be a mistake,” I say, but my voice is shaking now and I can feel the room starting to tilt. “I can’t be pregnant, I’m on birth control, I—”

“Birth control isn’t always one hundred percent effective,” Doctor Kent says, opening the folder and turning it so I can see the papers inside covered in numbers and medical terms I don’t understand.

“And we did an ultrasound last week when you came in complaining of fatigue.”

She slides a black and white image across the desk and I stare at it, at this tiny blob with what might be arms or legs, I can’t tell.

That’s inside me.

Growing and real.

“We’ll need to schedule a follow-up,” she continues, “and we should contact the father so he can be involved in—”

“No.” The word comes out harder than I meant it to.

She pauses, studying me with this careful expression. “Is the father not in the picture?”

“He’s—” I stop, swallow hard. “We haven’t spoken in three months. He’s on a business trip and he doesn’t know about this and I need to figure out what I’m doing before I tell him anything.”

Because the truth is I was already planning to leave Ryan before this happened, was already saving money and looking at apartments and trying to figure out how to end an engagement to someone who’s barely been present for the last two years.

Someone who proposed and then immediately became a stranger.

I’m still lost in it when the doctor snaps me out of my thoughts.

“Alright,” Doctor Kent says slowly. “ I’ll give you some privacy to process this. But Camille, when you’re ready, you need to schedule a follow-up appointment. There are things we need to discuss about the pregnancy and your options moving forward.”

Options.

Like this is some kind of choice I get to make when I’ve got two hundred dollars in my bank account and a fiancé who hasn’t bothered to call me in three months.

***

Outside the clinic I stand on the sidewalk trying to remember how to breathe, and my phone rings in my hand.

Reina.

“Hey,” I answer, and my voice cracks on the single word.

“What happened? What did she say?”

“I’m pregnant.”

Silence on the other end, so complete I think the call might have dropped.

“Reina?”

“Are you—Camille, are you sure?”

“Twelve weeks. She showed me the ultrasound.”

“Oh my god.” I hear her exhale sharply. “Does Ryan know?”

“No, and I’m not telling him. Not yet. Maybe not ever, I don’t know.”

“Wait, what do you mean not ever? Camille, he’s the father, he has a right to—”

“He left three months ago and hasn’t called me once,” I cut in, harsher than I mean. “One text message. Reina That’s it. ‘Busy, we’ll talk later.’ Except later never came and now I’m standing here pregnant with his baby and he doesn’t even know I exist.”

“Okay,” Reina says, and her voice has shifted into that calm problem-solving mode she gets sometimes. “Okay, where are you right now?”

“Outside the clinic.”

“Go home. Pack a bag. Don’t stay in that apartment tonight, not if you think Ryan might come back. Do you have somewhere you can go?”

I think about my parents, about how they love Ryan more than they’ve ever loved me, about how my mother insisted I move in with him the second we got engaged because it was “practical” and “modern” so she says.

About how they’d tell me I was being dramatic if I tried to explain why I can’t do this anymore.

“My parents won’t help,” I say quietly. “And you’re three hours away now with your new job.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I wish I could—what about a friend? Someone from work?”

I run through the list in my head and come up empty because somewhere along the way I lost all my friends, let them drift away while I was too busy trying to make Ryan love me the way he used to.

And then a name floats into my mind uninvited.

Jeremy.

Ryan’s best friend.

The one who used to show up at our apartment with takeout when Ryan worked late, who’d sit on the couch and actually talk to me like I was a person instead of just Ryan’s fiancée.

The one who called me Cam when everyone else called me Camille.

“I might have someone,” I hear myself say.

“Okay good. Go there. Get out of that apartment before Ryan comes back. And Camille-don’t tell him about the baby until you know what you want to do. Promise me.”

“I promise.”