I had imagined telling my husband I was pregnant a thousand different ways.
A candlelit dinner. A tiny pair of baby shoes wrapped in tissue paper. Maybe a handwritten note slipped into his jacket pocket.
Instead, I found out at seven in the morning while sitting on the bathroom floor with shaking hands and a pregnancy test balanced on my knee.
Positive.
After three years of trying. Three years of appointments, hormone shots, diets, vitamins, tears, and awkward conversations with relatives who kept asking when we were finally going to “start a family.”
I stared at those two pink lines until they blurred.
Then I cried.
Not the dramatic kind. Quiet tears. The kind that come from finally letting yourself believe something good might happen.
When I told Ethan that night, he actually lifted me off the kitchen floor and spun me around like people do in movies. I hadn’t seen him smile like that in years.
“We did it,” he whispered against my hair.
For the first time in a long time, we felt whole.
For twelve weeks, I lived carefully. I stopped drinking coffee. I downloaded pregnancy apps. I read articles at two in the morning about fetal development and nursery colors and prenatal vitamins. Ethan kissed my stomach every night before bed, even though there was barely anything there yet.
And then came his birthday.
I had planned a small dinner. Just us. His favorite steakhouse reservation. A wrapped watch hidden in my closet.
I never made it to dinner.
That morning I woke up with cramps.
By noon there was bl00d.
