She turned down another aisle, reluctant to leave. Once she did, she’d need to take Lily to the sitter’s, go to work. Where somebody would be attached to her hip for the rest of the day.
She wanted to do something normal, damn it. More, she wanted to feel like doing something. Anything.
And an absent glance to her right stopped her in her tracks.
Something that was both panic and nausea, with a helping of dull realization spurted into her belly. It continued to rise as she did hasty calculations in her head.
While everything inside her sank, Hayley closed her eyes. She opened them
again, looked into Lily’s happy face. And reached for the home pregnancy test.
SHE DROPPED LILY off, kept a smile plastered on her face until she walked out the door to her car. Afraid to do otherwise, she kept her mind blank while she drove home. She wouldn’t think, she wouldn’t project. She would just go home, take the test. Twice. When it came out negative, which of course it would, she’d hide the packages somewhere until she could dispose of them without anyone knowing she’d had a panic attack.
She wasn’t pregnant again. She absolutely couldn’t be pregnant again.
She parked, and made certain the boxes were buried at the bottom of her bag and well hidden. But she’d taken two steps into the house when David appeared like some magic genie.
“Hi, sugar, want a hand with that?”
“No.” She gripped the bag to her chest like a cache of gold. “No,” she repeated more calmly. “I’m just going to take these things up. And I have to pee, if that’s all the same to you.”
“It is. I often have to pee myself.”
Knowing her tone had been nasty, she rubbed a hand over her face. “I’m sorry. I’m in a mood.”
“Something else I often have.” He pulled an open tube of Life Savers from his pocket, thumbed out a cherry circle. “Open up.”
She smiled, obeyed.
“Let’s see if that sweetens your mood,” he said as he popped the candy into her mouth. “Can’t help worrying about you, honey.”
“I know. If I’m not back down in fifteen minutes, you can call out the cavalry. Deal?”
“Deal.”
She hurried up, then dumped the contents of the bag on her bed—for God’s sake, she’d forgotten the diapers. Cursing, she snatched both pregnancy tests and bolted to the bathroom.
For a moment she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to pee. Wouldn’t that just be her luck? She ordered herself to calm down, took several long breaths. Added a prayer.
Moments later, with the sweetness of cherry candy still on her tongue, she was staring at the stick with PREGNANT reading clear as day in its window.
“No.” She gripped the stick, shook it as if it were a thermometer and the action would drop things back down to normal. “No, no, no, no! What is this? What are you?” She looked down at herself, rapped a fist lightly below her navel. “Some kind of sperm magnet?”
Undone, she sat on the toilet lid, buried her face in her hands.
THOUGH SHE MIGHT have preferred to crawl into the cabinet under the sink, curl up in the dark, and stay there for the next nine months, she didn’t have much time to indulge in a pity fest. She washed her face, slapping on cold water to eradicate the signs of her bathroom crying jag.
“Yeah, crying’s going to make a difference,” she berated herself. “That’ll do the trick, all right. It’ll change everything so when you look at that stupid test again the damn stick will read: Why no, Hayley, you’re not pregnant. You just needed to sit on the toilet and bawl for ten minutes. Idiot.”
She sniffled back what felt like another flood of tears and faced herself in the mirror. “You played, now you pay. Deal with it.”
A quick makeup session helped. The sunglasses she grabbed out of her purse helped more.
She buried the home pregnancy test boxes in the bottom of her underwear drawer, jumpy as a drug addict hiding his stash.
When she went out, David was already halfway up the stairs.
“I was about to get my bugle.”