Grace managed to get through the day with only one crying spurt in the bathroom right after coming out of Danny’s office. She didn’t see him the next day or the next or at all for the next two weeks. Just when she had accepted that her world hadn’t been destroyed because he didn’t want her or because she’d slept with him, she realized something awful. Her female cycle was as regular as clockwork, so when things didn’t happen on the day they were supposed to happen, she knew something was wrong.
Though she and Danny had used condoms, they weren’t perfect. She bought an early pregnancy test and discovered her intuition had been correct. She had gotten pregnant.
She sat on the bed in the master suite of her little house. The room was awash with warm colors: cognac, paprika, butter-yellow in satin pillows, lush drapes and a smooth silk bedspread. But she didn’t feel any warmth as she stared at the results of the EPT. She had just gotten pregnant by a man who had told her he wanted nothing to do with her.
She swallowed hard and began to pace the honey-yellow hardwood floors of the bedroom she’d scrimped, saved and labored to refinish. Technically she had a great job and a good enough income that she could raise a child alone. Money wasn’t her problem. And neither was becoming a mother. She was twenty-four, ready to be a mom. Excited actually.
Except Danny didn’t want her. She might survive telling him, but she still worked for him. Soon everybody at his company would know she was pregnant. Anybody with a memory could do the math and realize when she’d gotten pregnant and speculate the baby might be Danny’s since they’d spent a weekend together.
He couldn’t run away from this and neither could she.
She took a deep breath, then another, and another, to calm herself.
Everything would be fine if she didn’t panic and handled this properly. She didn’t have to tell Danny right away that she was pregnant. She could wait until enough time had passed that he would see she wasn’t trying to force anything from him. Plus, until her pregnancy was showing, she didn’t have to tell anybody but Danny. In six or seven months the people she worked with wouldn’t necessarily connect her pregnancy with the weekend she and Danny together. They could get out of this with a minimum of fuss.
That made so much sense that Grace easily fell asleep that night, but the next morning she woke up dizzy, still exhausted and with an unholy urge to vomit. On Saturday morning, she did vomit. Sunday morning, she couldn’t get out of bed. Tired, nauseated and dizzy beyond belief, she couldn’t hide her symptoms from anybody. Which meant that by Monday afternoon, everybody would guess something was up, and she had no choice but to tell Danny first thing in the morning that she was pregnant. If she didn’t, he would find out by way of a rumor, and she couldn’t let that happen.
Grace arrived at work an hour early on Monday. Danny was already in his office but his secretary had not yet arrived. As soon as he was settled, she knocked on the frame of his open door.
He looked up. “Grace?”
“Do you have a minute?”
“Not really, I have a meeting—”
“This won’t take long.” She drank a huge gulp of air and pushed forward because there was no point in dillydallying. “I’m pregnant.”
For thirty seconds, Danny sat motionless. Grace felt every breath she drew as the tension in the room increased with each second that passed.
Finally he very quietly said, “Get out.”
“We need to talk about this.”
“Talk about this? Oh, no! I won’t give credence to your scheme by even gracing you with ten minutes to try to convince me you’re pregnant!”
“Scheme?”
“Don’t play innocent with me. Telling the man who broke up with you that you’re pregnant is the oldest trick in the book. If you think I’m falling for it, you’re insane.”
Grace hadn’t expected this would be an easy conversation, but for some reason or another she had expected it to be fair. The Danny she remembered from the beach house might have been shocked, but he would have at least given her a chance to talk.
“I’m not insane. I am pregnant.”
“I told you to get out.”
“This isn’t going to go away because you don’t believe me.”
“Grace, I said leave.”
His voice was hard and cold and his office fell deadly silent. Knowing there was no talking to him in that state and hoping that after she gave him a few hours for her announcement to sink in he might be more amenable to discussing it, Grace did as he asked. She left his office with her head high, controlling the tears that welled behind her eyelids.
The insult of his reaction tightened her chest and she marched straight to her desk. She yanked open the side drawer, withdrew her purse and walked out of the building as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do. When she got into her car, she dropped her head to her steering wheel and let the tears fall.
Eventually it would be obvious she hadn’t lied. But having Danny call her a schemer was the absolute worst experience she’d ever had.
Partially because he believed it. He believed she would trick him.
Grace’s cheeks heated from a sudden rush of indignation.
It was as if he didn’t know her at all—or she didn’t know him at all.
Or maybe they didn’t know each other.
She started her car and headed home. She needed the day to recover from that scene, but also as sick as she was she couldn’t go back to work until she and Danny had talked this out. Pretty soon everybody would guess what had happened. If nothing else, they had to do damage control. There were lots of decisions that had to be made. So when she got home she would call her supervisor, explain she’d gotten sick and that she might be out a few days. Then she and Danny would resolve this away from the office.
Because she had written down his home number and cell number when he left the message on her answering machine the Sunday night he’d returned from his business trip, Grace called both his house and his cell that night.
He didn’t answer.
She gave him forty-eight hours and called Thursday morning before he would leave for work. Again, no answer.
A little more nervous now, she gave him another forty-eight hours and called Saturday morning. No answer.
She called Monday night. No answer.
And she got the message. He wasn’t going to pick up her calls.
But by that time she had something a little more serious to handle. She couldn’t get well. Amazed that she’d even been able to go to work the Monday of her encounter with Danny, she spent her days in bed, until, desperate for help and advice, she told her mother that she was pregnant and sicker than she believed was normal. They made a quick gynecologist appointment and her doctor told her
