He stared at the ceiling for a while before he answered slowly. “I think it would be a mistake,” he said. “I’ve been turning it over in my mind for the last few days and . . . I don’t think we should get married because of this. We should get married because we want to get married, because we’re ready to commit ourselves to each other. If this hadn’t happened and I proposed to you tonight, what would you have said?”

I already felt tears pooling in my eyes, but I knew the answer: “I’d have said you were crazy,” I told him, honestly. “That we’re too young. That there’s so much more we have to learn and to figure out. That I love you like mad, but we’ve only known each other for ten months.”

He slid closer to me, and I rested my head on his shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “So if we get married now, I think we’d be making a mistake. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have this baby, raise this baby, if you want to. And maybe get married later.” He paused. “Do you?” he asked. I didn’t answer, realizing in that moment that he was telling me he didn’t. Trying to think about whether I did. Thinking about what it would mean for me, for him, for both of us, for our lives, for a child’s life, for our music. He clarified, “Do you want to be a mom?”

And I rolled over so my face was hidden in the crook of his neck and sobbed. Because I didn’t. And I felt horrible that I didn’t—like I was betraying biology, like I was betraying society, like I was betraying you, growing inside me.

He held me, and he kissed my forehead and stroked my hair and said it would be okay. But I really had no idea how it would.

15

Emily went to work. She listened as students told her about their anxiety, about their fights with their roommates, about how they missed home. They told her about the racist comments someone made to them in the cafeteria, about how an econ professor called on the men in the class more often than the women. They told her about how they were worried about their friends who drank too much or smoked too much. About being attracted to their TA, about their eating disorders and their depression. She listened, she asked pointed questions, she posed her advice as a “what if?” She tried not to think about what might or might not be happening in her body. She wondered if she was even helping these students. If any of what she said made sense. Or even mattered. She tried not to cry.

Between patients, she would whisper “I love you” and “please be okay” to the cells inside her.