It was my life to be alone at the end of the day. Sure, I might run into people along the way. Sure, I might even have some wild fucking sex. But wild fucking sex, though it may have correlated to spending the night, did not equal spending the night.
As quickly as I could, I got my clothes back on. Just as I heard the sound of the toilet flushing, I opened the front door, made my way around a corner, and disappeared into the night.
The only thing I did before I left was make sure that the front desk knew to put the charge on my card. Kelly would hate me enough for what I’d done. I didn’t need her to also have surprise bills on top of it.
But it was for the best. The less she knew of me, much less my name, the better things would be.
And the more I could avoid attaching myself to anyone, the safer we would all be.
Chapter 3: Kelly
One Month Later
I was in the bathroom, organizing my toiletries, when I realized something.
My period had never come this month.
So what did I do?
I laughed.
No, no way that life could be so ironically cruel as to make me pregnant now. After a shattered marriage, years of self-loathing, isolation in the woods, and a certainty that my body just wasn’t made to carry babies, now it was going to give me a sign that I was pregnant? That was, with all respect to Mother Nature, fucking impossible.
I’d had a shit month and had probably just been so stressed that I’d delayed my period a bit. That had to be it.
Except…
When my husband and I were trying to make it through the last bits of hope we had, we kept saying, “that had to be it.” We lived in denial so deep that we couldn’t even see what acceptance looked like, let alone consider it. Fair or unfair, I had pinned most of this on him, figuring that I was better equipped to handle hard truths than he was. It was time to prove it.
I drove to the nearest pharmacy, got a pregnancy test—all the while feeling ridiculous, like I was an old man buying condoms, as if I was the one who was going to use them—and drove him, still finding the whole thing absurd.
What if it’s not absurd? It’s what you’ve always wanted, is it not?
I got home, too anxious to do anything other than take the test. I took out the test, peed on it, and looked at the results.
And.
Holy.
Shit.
It had to be a mistake. It just…
There was no fucking way!
I…I…I didn’t know what the fuck to think.
On the one hand, this was what I’d always wanted. If this had happened during my marriage, I would still be back in Florida. I would still be married, still love my body, have none of these self-loathing fears…I would feel complete and whole. And now I had it.
But on the other hand, look at my life! I was all alone, distanced from my friends in Miami. I had no idea who the father was. I mean, I had a pretty good guess—that Trent guy, so at least I’d gotten some of the best sex of my life out of the moment—but boy…one, I hadn’t seen him anywhere since that night, so it wasn’t like I could just walk to his favorite pub and catch him off-guard. And two, what made a man great in bed and what made a man great as a father did not necessarily overlap that much.
I only needed to consider the fact that the asshole had literally left the room within seconds of coming, all while I sat on a toilet trying to clean up the hot mess that he’d left behind.
What the fuck was I to do?
I wasn’t getting an abortion. I’d waited too long to try and make this happen. But…why did it seem like I was getting something of a devil’s bargain? It was as if life was finally going to give me what I’d craved the most…but only after it had sunk so low that it felt like everything was a disaster.
Well, I’ve dealt with worse.
Let’s just hope this is, in fact, the worst.
Present Day
She’s growing up so fast.
I sat on the couch, holding my daughter, Charlotte, in my lap. She was struggling to stay awake, and to be honest, I kind of relished the chance to just sit back and do nothing. We’d had a long week, and I welcomed a moment where my daughter, my dog, and I could just cuddle all together on the couch, with some random movie on the television, serving as nothing more than background noise as we zoned out.
These days, I had a tendency to zone out quite a bit more than usual. For this first year, I’d felt like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to take care of Charlotte’s needs and also make sense of what she wanted. Even though money was no issue and even though time was no issue, being a mom was a job that left me wishing I’d had thirty hours in the day instead of twenty-four
But the one good thing about that was that because I kept myself so damn busy, because I spent all but the smallest of moments either with Charlotte or thinking about her, I did not have a lot of time to worry about broader questions.
Like, “who is her father and where is he now?”
But now, as I sat on my couch, Charlotte’s eyes now fully closed and dozing off
