The test was cheap.
Three for twelve dollars from the corner store off Cascade. I don’t even know why I bought it—maybe the nausea, maybe the ache in my chest that wouldn’t go away even after the tears dried up. Or maybe deep down, I already knew.
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Two lines.
Bold. Bright. No hesitation.
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Pregnant.
With a dead man’s baby.
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I sat on the bathroom floor in my robe, legs shaking, eyes red. I couldn’t stop staring at the damn test like it was gonna change its mind. I’d buried Davon three weeks ago. His suit still hanging in our closet. His toothbrush still next to mine. His cologne still lingering in the air like he was just in the room a minute ago.
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But he was gone.
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Just… gone.
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No warning. No slow decline. One minute we’re arguing about how I forgot to pick up his dry cleaning, and the next, I’m getting a call from Grady Memorial saying he collapsed in the parking lot outside some apartment complex I ain’t never heard of.
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Stage four stomach cancer.
That’s what the doctor said. Quiet, like I was gonna break into pieces right there in front of him.
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“Did you say stage four?” I remember whispering. “What happened to one through three?”
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He’d known. That’s the part that cut the deepest. My husband knew he was dying and didn’t say a word. Not a warning. Not a heads-up. Nothing. Just worked, came home, fucked me like nothing was wrong, and planned a future he knew he wouldn’t be around for.
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I thought that was the worst part—until the funeral.
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That’s when she showed up.
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Keisha.
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She didn’t say her name. She didn’t need to. I recognized her from an old fight. Five years ago. Curly weave. Gold hoops. Nails like claws. She had the audacity to cry. Loud, too—like her heart broke deeper than mine. Like he wasn’t my husband and my pain wasn’t louder than hers.
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People whispered. I ignored it. Until her mother pulled me aside in the church basement and said the thing that cracked my whole world open:
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“They both gone now. You don’t gotta hold onto the hate, baby. God saw them both.”
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“Both?” I asked. “What you mean both?”
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Her eyes dropped. “Keisha passed the same night. Same hospital. Same damn cancer.”
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I couldn’t breathe.
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The same night.
The same damn hospital.
The same disease.
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It made sense now. Why he had those random disappearances. Why he was always tired. Why he started sleeping in sweatshirts in the middle of summer—covering the weight he was losing, the bruises I thought were from work. He wasn’t just hiding sickness…
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He was hiding her.
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I was sharing a dying man with another woman. And we both didn’t even know how close the end really was.
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Now here I am.
Pregnant by a man I didn’t even fully know.
Carrying the child of a liar. A lover. A man who was mine… and also not mine at all.
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And still… I loved him.
Even when I hated him.
Even when the truth burned through every memory like acid.
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I pressed my hand to my stomach, and for the first time, I whispered out loud, “It’s just us now, baby.
