Sex—it was a life-altering event. From the time your hormones came to life and encouraged you to get laid, you were pretty much screwed.

It was a bargaining chip.

A stress reliever.

Some girls needed to love the guy in order to do the deed. Others were only in it for a good time; commitment wasn’t in the books.

Sometimes it rocked one’s world.

Other times you wondered why you had even bothered—the guy had no idea how to make a woman come. Unfortunately, they didn’t wear a warning label.

They really should.

And sometimes sex came with consequences. The kind of consequences that started with you in the bathroom, the peed-on pregnancy test doing its thing next to you on the counter.

There it was, by the sink as I finished washing my hands. My life? Now at the mercy of a frigging piece of plastic.

If there was ever a time to fail at something, this would be it. Except, when had I ever failed at anything I did?

Never. That was when.

I dried my hands and escaped the bathroom as though it contained a ticking bomb. Kelsey and Erin, my closest friends, were standing in the hallway of my apartment with expectant looks on their faces. I shrugged. “I don’t know yet.” I indicated over my shoulder to the bathroom. “It’s in there…but I can’t look.”

“Do you want me to tell you?” Kelsey asked. Her tone had enough sympathy to overflow an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Sympathy with a splash of excitement. Kelsey loved babies.

Normally, I was a brave woman. I had moved thousands of kilometers from my home in Australia to do my MBA in the U.S., even though there were plenty of great schools back home. After that, I’d landed a brilliant job here in San Francisco. Every day, I lived, breathed, survived in the testosterone-dominated world of finance which required me to be a brave and confident woman.

But normally brave and confident me couldn’t find even a millimeter of courage to check my fate when it came to the pregnancy test.

I nodded in response to Kelsey’s question.

“Okay,” she said softly, possibly to avoid freaking me out more than I already was. Good luck with that.

She entered the bathroom with Erin and I trailing after her as though she were a brave warrior princess getting ready to slay the evil dragon.

I would have gladly taken an evil fire-breathing dragon any day over what was really waiting for us. Behold Holly—destroyer of all things not so pleasant. For that, I could be kick-ass confident.

My bathroom wasn’t large by any stretch of the imagination, but it had never felt so small until that moment. And it had nothing to do with the three of us crammed into the space. Of course, Erin being eight-months pregnant didn’t help either. And right now? She was the poster woman of what the plastic stick possibly held for me—a future involving multiple trips a day to the loo.

She glanced longingly at the toilet. I guess that was my hint to get this over with ASAP.

Kelsey picked up the stick and studied it.

“What does it say?” Bonus points to me for not squeaking when I asked the question.

She didn’t say anything at first, her expression not giving any indication of what she was thinking—or what answer stared back at her.

“Did it work?” I asked. There was always a chance I had done it wrong. Peeing on a stick wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Or maybe the test was faulty. There was always that too.

She nodded slowly, still staring at the stick. Then her gaze slid to mine, and without her saying anything, I knew the answer. Sympathy and awe and happiness all shone back at me. “You’re going to have a baby.” dpg

She handed me the test and the answer was there for the world to see.

But it was the wrong answer.

I wasn’t pregnant. I was sure of it.

Pregnancy tests weren’t a hundred percent accurate. They were ninety-nine percent accurate. It said so on the box. Which meant one out of a hundred times they were incorrect.

And this test was that magical one—the test that got the answer wrong.

Right?