After His Ex Faked Cancer, I Lost Our Baby

The pain arrives without warning on a Wednesday afternoon.

One moment I am reviewing elevation drawings on my second monitor, the next I am folded over my desk with both arms wrapped around my midsection, breathing through my teeth. It is not the low, familiar ache I have been managing for weeks with ginger tea and careful posture. This is something else — a deep, grinding pressure that radiates upward from my stomach into my ribs, squeezing the air out of me in slow, methodical increments.

I reach for my phone.

Ryder's line rings four times and drops to voicemail. I hang up and call again. Voicemail. A third time, and this time it doesn't even ring — just clicks straight to silence, which means he's seen my name and pressed decline, or he's turned the phone face-down on a table somewhere and let it go dark.

I sit with that for exactly as long as I can afford to, which is about thirty seconds, and then I gather my coat and my bag and I tell my colleague Priya that I'm not feeling well and I take the elevator down alone.

The clinic is six blocks away. I walk them slowly, one hand pressed flat against my side, the cold air doing something useful against the sweat at the back of my neck. The receptionist takes one look at me and moves me to the front of the queue, which tells me something about what I must look like.

The doctor is a woman in her fifties with reading glasses pushed up into her hair and the particular manner of someone who has learned to deliver difficult information without softening it into uselessness. She presses two fingers beneath my ribs and watches my face. She asks me to step on the scale. She looks at the number, then at my chart, then back at me.

"How much weight have you lost in the last six weeks?"

"I don't know. Some."

"Eleven pounds, according to your last visit." She sets the clipboard down. "Combined with the pain pattern you're describing and the vomiting frequency — this isn't consistent with a typical pregnancy presentation. I want to run a full gastrointestinal panel. Imaging included."

I look at the paper she slides across the desk. The list of tests is long.

"What are you looking for?"

She meets my eyes without flinching. "I want to rule some things out before I can tell you what I'm looking for."

I sign the form. I sit in the waiting room for two hours with a paper cup of water I don't drink, and I do not call Ryder again.

---

Our anniversary is the fourteenth.

I know it is a foolish thing to do. I know it even as I am doing it — pulling the good pan from the cabinet, unwrapping the short ribs I bought at the butcher on Amsterdam Avenue, the one my grandmother used to take me to on the first Saturday of every month when I was small enough to hold her hand without embarrassment. I know it as I set the table with the cloth napkins we only use for occasions, as I light the candles and change into the green dress he once said made my eyes look like something worth looking at.

I know. And I do it anyway, because there is a version of tonight I have been carrying in my chest for weeks, and I am not ready to put it down.

By eight o'clock the short ribs are resting under foil. By eight-thirty I have moved the candles twice, trying to find the arrangement that looks least like I tried. At nine-oh-four, my phone buzzes against the tablecloth.

*So sorry — bad episode tonight, can't leave her. Rain check? I'll make it up to you. Promise.*

I read it twice. Then I set the phone face-down and sit in the chair I pulled out for myself and look at the table I set for two.

I eat alone. The short ribs are good — my grandmother's recipe, low and slow, the way she taught me — and I eat every bite because wasting food is a habit I was never allowed to develop. I pour myself a glass of water. I do not pour the wine.

Afterward, I wash the dishes. I dry them. I put them away in the cabinet where they belong.

And standing at the sink with the dish towel in my hands, I do something I have not allowed myself to do in weeks — I count. I count the dinners eaten alone, the calls that went to voicemail, the side of the bed that has gone cold, the anniversary trip unpacked and folded back into drawers. I count the mornings I woke up nauseous and said nothing, the photograph I deleted without showing him, the doctor's appointment I attended by myself this afternoon.

I count until the number is too large to argue with.

Then I fold the dish towel over the oven handle, the way my grandmother always did, and I turn off the kitchen light.