“I get it. I feel the same way about my accident.” I scoot closer until we’re only a few inches apart. “Look, if there’s some big, ex-girlfriend-shaped skeleton in your closet that’s going to come after us, I should know about it, right? Whatever happened, you can tell me. I’m here for you.” I lay my hand on his and squeeze.
He sighs. “Fine. Sadie is a wild card, and I wouldn’t put it past her to try to get at me through someone I’m dating—she’s that kind of person…” He sucks in a deep breath. “So basically, she faked a pregnancy in an attempt to get me to marry her.”
My jaw falls open. “What? No way. That’s ridiculous. No one actually does that.”
“She did.”
“How do you know she was faking it? What happened?”
“We’d been together for about seven months when one day she tells me, surprise, she’s pregnant.”
“She wasn’t on birth control?” I blurt out the first thought that comes to mind and immediately grimace.
“Yeah, she was, which is why I was so shocked. I didn’t think getting pregnant was a real possibility, especially since we’d been taking other precautions. But even though it was a complete surprise, I had no reason to think she’d lie. And she seemed genuinely excited about it.”
“Were you? Excited, that is?”
“Not at first,” he admits. “I was pretty freaked out when she broke the news and showed me a picture of the pregnancy test, but I loved her. I thought she was the one I’d end up with in the long haul, so a pregnancy simply fast-tracked our plans by a few years. So when she said she wanted to keep the baby, I supported her choice. We even started looking for an apartment together and talking baby names…”
By the faraway look in his eye, I’d bet he was more excited about the prospect of a baby than he’s letting on. My heart constricts and I rub the center of my chest. Poor Devin. To have his excitement over becoming a father build up only to have it ripped away? I can’t imagine what that feels like.
“That’s when she began pushing marriage. Asking if we could get married before the baby comes, how soon, when could we set a date, that sort of thing. She was relentless.” His expression hardens. “Then about a month later, I was at her apartment helping her pack—we were about to sign a lease on a two-bedroom condo in the suburbs—when I went into her bathroom and noticed a spot of blood on the toilet seat and the wrapper for a pad in the trash can,” he says softly.
The hairs on my arms stand on end, but he continues.
“I asked her if she was okay, and she said she’d been bleeding a little, but it was normal and nothing to worry about. Well, of course, I was worried—because it didn’t look like just a little blood to me, it looked like a lot—so I insisted she call her doctor. That’s when things got weird. She refused point-blank to call her doctor and accused me of overreacting. She said she knew her body best and everything was fine. Well, I wasn’t willing to chance it, so I found her ob-gyn’s number in her phone and called for her. It was after-hours, so the nurse on call told me she needed an ultrasound as soon as possible and that I should take her to the ER.”
“What did Sadie do then?” I say, almost afraid to ask.
“When I told her what the nurse said she turned as white as a sheet and could barely even speak.” He shakes his head. “It’s funny—looking back, I thought her reaction was concern for the baby, but now I see she was freaking out because she knew she couldn’t keep up the lie anymore. There was no way she could reasonably refuse to go to the hospital once her doctor’s office suggested it, so I drove her. That’s when I found out she wasn’t actually pregnant. An ultrasound confirmed it.”
Devin sighs. “Not that Sadie would have told me herself. She did everything in her power to keep me out of the hospital room and far away from the doctor—manufacturing things she wanted so I would get them for her, inventing errands. But I was there when he shared the results. No baby.”
I squeeze his arm so hard my fingers ache. “I’m so sorry, Devin.”
He nods heavily. “Her lies unraveled after that. Like why she only showed me a picture of a positive pregnancy test instead of the test itself—probably because she never actually took one and must have pulled a picture off the Internet. Or how she miraculously became pregnant despite being on birth control, and conveniently right around the time we’d started arguing more. I broke up with her that night and haven’t seen her since.”