I went back to work two days later. Sun, Maria, and I were selling tequila at a fancy Mexican restaurant. We wore black dresses and bright red lipstick and the money was good.

“Hey,” Sun said one night after work. “Want to go out tonight?”

“It’s midnight, Sun,” I said, through a yawn.

“Night’s just getting started. There’s a band playing down at the HiLo.”

I shook my head, exhausted. Exhausted by work. Exhausted by pretending to be okay. Exhausted by trying not to think of Jack and then failing. And failing. And failing.

The failure not to think about Jack was killing me.

He was killing me.

The memory of his hands. Of his smile. The tilt of his chin in the tub as he drank. The rumble of his chest under my ear as he laughed, telling me dirty economic jokes. These things snuck up on me like ghosts in the night, waking me up from disturbing dreams of endless staircases heading up to walls of black windows.

“I’m just going to crash at my sister’s,” I said.

“Do you want to come over tomorrow?” Maria asked me. “Julio is gone and it’s just me and Valentina.”

Tears bit at the back of my eyes and I looked into the wind so I wouldn’t cry.

“Thanks guys, but I’m fine.”

But I wasn’t and everyone knew it.

Though there were moments I was successful. But mostly there were hours of missing him, of touching my lips and holding back tears or screams.

A rage so sharp it turned to grief.

A grief so big it turned to rage.

I slept most nights at Charlotte’s house, and she didn’t ask too many questions. At least not with her mouth. Her eyes all but screamed her concern.

I stepped out of the BART station closest to her house (because damn Jack and his argument about debt), the wind picking up my hair and pushing it across my face, and I smacked it back, wrenching it all into a tight ponytail that made my eyes water. In my back pocket my phone vibrated, and I couldn’t stop the leap of my heart when I pulled it out.

Please, I thought. Please be him.

But it was Charlotte.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound cheerful as I answered.

“Hey, you on your way?” she asked.

“Ten minutes.”

“Can you stop at the corner store and grab some tampons?” she asked.

I stopped in my tracks. Tampons. My period.

Shit.

“Abby?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll grab some. See you soon.”

It’s nothing, I thought as I walked up the hill toward Charlotte’s condo and the corner store at the end of her block. It’s stress. I mean… things have been so stressful. It only makes sense that my period would be a day… no, two days… late.

“What’s wrong with you?” my sister asked two days later as I was flopped across her purple loveseat, staring at the ceiling, trying to make my stomach cramp and my breasts sore. Trying to will my period into coming.

“Do you feel all right?” she asked.

Four days late.

Four. Days.

The pill pretty much made me regular like a clock. Four days late never happened.

And the morning after pill wasn’t always effective.

And I almost told her. But again, I didn’t want to be this person again. I didn’t want to be the one always coming to her for help. Always needing her.

I was tired of being me.

And if I said it out loud, it was real. Like really real.

“Fine,” I said. “Just tired. I think I’m going to go home tonight.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Is that okay?” I was snapping at her and I didn’t want to. I didn’t mean to. But I was out of control of myself.

“Totally fine,” she said with all the patience my sister always used with me.

I left her house and took the train back to my neighborhood and immediately walked to the Safeway, where I bought a pregnancy test.

It sat on my counter for two days.

I lay in my bed, remembering the feel of Jack inside of me that night. The incendiary heat. The terrible beauty of being skin to skin with him. Had I done this on purpose in some way, I wondered, curled under my covers with my blankets over my head.

Knowing he was going to kick me out of his life, had I planned this in some passive-aggressive way?

I sobbed once, hard into my hands. The tears like bricks inside my head, refusing to come out.

No, I thought. Don’t be like this.

You didn’t trick him. You didn’t try and get pregnant. You just got caught up in that moment.

Both of us did.

I pushed off the blanket, got up, and took the damn pregnancy test.

When the blue cross appeared, I wasn’t even surprised. I couldn’t even muster up the fear I’d been living with for four days. It was like the blue cross just obliterated that cloud of fear.

This was real.

It was happening.

I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t.

Three weeks after that weekend with Jack—I was pregnant with his baby.