I waited until I heard the toilet flush and the sink being used. When she turned off the faucet, I opened the door and went in. I’d already read the directions. It had indicated a three-minute wait after use. I glanced at my watch. She stared at me in the mirror as she dried her hands.

“Hopefully that makes you happy. You have gone so far over the top this time that you might as well be on your space station trip again,” she huffed, flushing red with anger. “I’m out of here—as in packing up my desk and walking the fuck out of here.”

“You aren’t going to wait a minute for the results?”

She rolled her eyes. “I already know what the results are. It’s humiliating enough that you made me pee on a stick in your bathroom, I don’t need to wait around to find out what I already know.”

I glanced at the test sitting on the back of the toilet where she’d set it. She turned to leave. Very clearly I saw two lines. Two pink lines. The three minutes weren’t even up yet.

She was halfway out the door when I said, “It’s positive.”

She froze and turned around and stared at me in the mirror. “Is that a fucking—”

But I held up the test so she could see and she never finished that question. Her eyes landed on the test and then widened in horror. She’d been fully convinced that she wasn’t pregnant.

But she was. I searched inside myself for some reaction to that knowledge and all I felt was a coldness, a distance. Shock. Disbelief. I read once that these were mechanisms used by the mind to protect itself from falling apart in times of high stress.

Her demeanor changed immediately. She started shaking. “It’s a mistake. It has to be a mistake. Where’s the other one?” Emilia had run straight through shock and into denial.

I found the box and handed her the remaining test from the double pack. I was pretty certain those results were going to come up the same, but if she needed that confirmation, I wasn’t going to deny her. She stared at it, her brows knitting in confusion.

“It’s—it’s wrong. These things are wrong sometimes, right?” Her voice settled somewhere between hysteria and panic, trembling along with the rest of her. “I can’t go pee again right now.”

I’ll admit that in another circumstances, if I wasn’t so ragingly pissed off, I might have tried to comfort her. But I didn’t.

Because I hadn’t wanted that thing to be positive any more than she had. Any hopes of healing us, of getting back what we’d lost, seemed gone now, blown away in the wind. The heavy weight of this new development would snap the fledgling branch upon which our hearts, our lives hung. We couldn’t handle our own lives and now there was another one in the balance?

She stared at me for a long moment and I didn’t move, didn’t say a word. I had no idea what the hell to say. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was so done with this. With us. With the lies and the stupid games. The rage started to bubble up, burning through the layers of ice in my gut, melting the shock. How I hated the powerlessness I felt at that moment. My life was careening, out of control.

My hands clenched into fists and that red-hot lava burned up every limb. She seemed to be pressing herself into the bathroom door, or using it to hold herself up. I squeezed past her and stalked back into the office. The first thing I did was grab that ridiculous vase that Maggie had put on the table last month—one filled with a bunch of colored marbles. I turned and slammed it against the wall. It shattered into fragments, marbles bouncing everywhere. And it didn’t make me feel better in the least. Fuck.

I turned to stand next to the window. The top part of my vision had that curious wavy quality to it, a migraine aura presaging another vicious strike of lightning into my brain at any time now. Great. Just fucking great.

After long moments where I continued to stare into the daylight as if daring the headache to flare up, she reentered the room. I couldn’t look at her.

I stood rigid, still, my arms folded across my chest. I’d been so careful, always, with my sex partners. I’d never had sex without a condom and usually some other type of birth control on her part. But I had never used a condom with Emilia. Had trusted her to bear the burden of the birth control. That probably wasn’t entirely fair of me but goddamn, it’s the way it had been between us since the beginning and damn her for changing the rules without telling me.

Whether or not this was intentional, it was a trap. She had knowingly gone to bed with me unprotected.

“Adam,” she said, her voice quiet, hoarse from unshed tears.