“You don’t look so great,” Mom greets me as I step through the swinging kitchen door that is propped open.

“Thanks,” I mumble, and she rolls her eyes as she walks toward me, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, while Jacob—who is sitting on one of the barstools, drinking a Coke, with his other hand in a bag of chips—laughs.

“Stop being dramatic. I’m just saying that you don’t look like you feel well.” She stops in front of me and rests the back of her hand against my forehead. “You don’t have a fever.”

“I’m fine.” It’s a lie. I feel nauseous, and the smell of whatever it is she’s making is not helping.

“Maybe you’re coming down with something.”

“I’m not,” I lie again, or maybe it’s not a lie.

You can’t just come down with pregnancy.

And that’s what this is.

How do I know?

Well, four days ago, after realizing that I missed my period, I took a pregnancy test, and it came back with two lines so dark there was no misreading it. Still, I took about a dozen more in a multitude of brands just to confirm the first wasn’t a fluke, and they all came back the same way.

Even with the image of those tests pasted to the back of my eyelids, mocking me every time I blink, I’m currently in the denial stage of the situation. It’s a good place to be.

Okay, that’s also a lie. It’s the worst place to be because every second of every day, there is a tiny voice in the back of my head telling me that I need to talk to Dayton, but the idea of not only seeing him again but telling him that I’m pregnant with his child is terrifying. Neither of us thought about the consequences of what we did weeks ago. Or at least I didn’t think about the fact that we didn’t use protection, nor that I’m not on anything to prevent pregnancy.

I got off birth control a year after Matthew and I got married, when we decided to start trying to conceive. That obviously never happened. Then, I didn’t think about it because I stopped having sex with him, and I just never got back on anything because so much time had passed in which I never even had a scare.

To this day, I don’t know why we couldn’t get pregnant. As far as my doctor said, everything looked normal on my end, but any time I brought up the idea of going to a specialist for Matthew to get tested, he’d get annoyed. He was positive that it would happen when it was supposed to, and he didn’t need someone else involved.