“Do you want some toast?”

“No. I just—gonna go back to sleep, I think.”

Mom was there with me, following, helping me into bed and tucking me in. She tutted and fussed over me, her hand on my forehead. She produced a thermometer. I had what she thought was a low-grade fever. She offered to stay home and nurse me but I told her I’d be fine, and I was fine a few hours later, if not slightly queasy. We both dismissed it as a bout of the flu. It wasn’t until three days later when she hauled my sorry, pukey self to the doctor for said flu that The Question was asked.

“Could you be pregnant?” the nurse asked.

She seemed nice—Deb, her name tag said. She wore scrubs with cartoon kitties. A stethoscope looped around her neck. Her hair was salt-and-pepper gray and tied back in a ponytail. Her eyeliner was on point—perfect cat wings that could have cut a man who got too close.

“What?”

Mom was in the waiting room. I was sitting on the examination table with its crinkly paper cover, my feet dangling off the side and not touching the floor.

“Could you be pregnant?”

“No,” I immediately said, because again, I hadn’t missed a period at that point and I had no idea you could bleed and be pregnant. Deb nodded, jotted down some notes, took my temperature and blood pressure, and ducked out of the room. It wasn’t until the door slammed behind her that I started freaking out about the Jack thing all over again. I never had managed to track him down. Calls to friends and having those friends call their friends yielded nothing—he was the amazing disappearing penis. I was disappointed, honestly, and it’d taken me a few weeks to overcome the self-doubt, confusion and paranoia about his potentially toxic pants parts, but eventually I’d accepted it as a thing that’d happened, live and learn. There were other Jacks in the sea.

It was, as Devi not-so-poetically put it, my sticky send-off to an old life in an old town.

But there I was, months later, sweating it again, literally days before I moved to Stonington.

Maybe Jack’s back. Like a bad penny, Mormor would say.

I was chewing my fingernails down to stubs when Deb reappeared with the plastic sample cup and wipes. She motioned at the closed door of the doctor’s office bathroom behind her. “Just leave that in the slot in the wall when you’re done,” she said. “Dr. Bhatia will be in shortly.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks—for the pee cup,” I followed up with, because I’m a nervous talker and that’s not at all awkward.

Deb eyed me like she might track a rabid lab animal. “You’re welcome.”