Pregnant For My Own Good

Three months after the wreck, Megan dragged me out of an upscale bar downtown. I was blind drunk. She loosened my tie with sharp, impatient tugs, her knee wedged against the edge of the mattress as her fingers went to work on my collar buttons. "Andrew, the specialist said your reproductive tract took damage, not that you stopped being a man," she snapped, tossing the silk strip onto the nightstand. "What are you doing to yourself?" She always had a tongue like a switchblade. Yet later that night, when she pulled me into a kiss in the dark, the rims of her eyelids were raw and damp against my cheek. So when someone at a dinner party months later subtly made a crack about my ruined lineage, Megan didn't hesitate. She hurled half a glass of cabernet right into the man’s tailored lapel. "Whether my husband can father a dynasty is none of your goddamn business," she snarled. I honestly believed she didn't care about having a child. Until six months later, when the subtle swell of her lower stomach caught the morning light. I stood there in our kitchen, staring at an ultrasound printout marked "twelve weeks", unable to draw enough air into my lungs to speak. Megan, on the other hand, was completely poised. She leaned back into the plush linen of the sofa, arms folded loosely over her chest, even offering a faint, wry smile. "Don't give me that ghost-face," she murmured. "Consider it a gift. A ready-made family." My fingers trembled against the paper. "Whose is it?" She arched an eyebrow. "Does it matter? His birth certificate will say Andrew Eden. He carries your name." For the first time in seven years, the woman sitting in front of me felt entirely like a stranger. A frightening one. She reached out, her fingers hooking through my belt loop, pulling me down an inch with slow, deliberate ease. "Andrew, you should be thanking me," she whispered, her gaze locked on mine. "When people see you pushing a stroller through the neighborhood, they won’t be whispering behind your back that you're broken anymore." I looked down at her polished hand resting against my hip. There was a time when that exact touch would have brought me to my knees. I would have laid down my life for her without a second thought. Now, all I felt was a cold, crawling revulsion. ... I reached down and peeled her fingers off my belt. It wasn't a violent motion, but Megan froze anyway. She wasn't used to me pulling away. In seven years, no matter how reckless her temper or how bruised my pride, all she had to do was curl against my chest or crook a finger, and the fight would leave me. She used to tease me for it. "Andrew, you're hopeless. I've got you wrapped around my little finger, haven't I?" This time, I took two deliberate steps back, putting the width of the coffee table between us. "Whose is it, Megan?" The playful edge on her face evaporated. "Do you really need to cross-examine me?" "Asking who slept with my wife is an interrogation now?" Her brows knitted together. "Don't be crude." A bitter laugh nearly tore out of my throat. She was carrying another man's child under her ribs, yet my vocabulary was what offended her. On the glass table, her phone screen lit up. "Philip." Philip Dalton. Her childhood neighbor. The guy who’d known her since scraped knees and orthodontic braces. I had shared dinners with him, poured him scotch in this very room. The preview notification was a single line: "Don’t fight him too hard on this. Stress isn't good for you in the first trimester." I stared at the letters. Megan lunged forward to swipe the phone, but my palm came down flat over the screen first. "Philip?" The room went dead silent for three agonizing seconds. "Yes," she said. The tiny, irrational spark of hope remaining in my chest extinguished like water on grease. "You slept with him." Megan pinched the bridge of her nose, an irritated sigh slipping past her lips. "Once." She said it so casually. Lightly, as if she were informing me she’d ordered almond milk instead of oat at the drive-thru. I stood rooted to the hardwood, numbness creeping up from my ankles. Megan rose from the couch and crossed the space between us. "Andrew, look at me. There are no feelings there. It was entirely my idea." She reached out, though this time she didn't touch me. "I didn't want a faceless donor from some anonymous frozen bank. Philip has a clean medical history, an Ivy League pedigree, and I’ve known him all my life. More importantly, he signed an agreement in principle. He swore he will never interfere with our family." She presented it as if it were a masterpiece of logistics, designed solely for my convenience. "So you audited candidates?" I asked, my voice barely a thread. Her expression faltered. "What?" "You made a checklist. Good genetics. Stable lineage. Someone who wouldn't sue for weekend custody later." I swallowed the acid rising in my throat. "Do you honestly think you were being practical, Megan?" Her patience snapped. "Then what the hell did you want me to do?" she hissed, stepping into my personal space. "Do you have any idea what they were saying about you after the accident? The looks your partners gave you at the firm? Did you see yourself when you dragged yourself home every night, reeking of bourbon?" A fierce, wounded red crept into her eyes. "Every time someone made a veiled comment about how tragic it was that the Eden line was dead, I had to swallow my pride and smile. Andrew, it was killing me, too!" Her voice cracked. "I just wanted to make it stop." I held her gaze. "So you spread your legs for Philip." "Yes." "For me?" "Yes!" That single affirmative sounded viler to my ears than a brazen confession of passion ever could have. I gave a short, mechanical nod. "Okay." Megan blinked, thrown by the lack of screaming. "What does that mean?" I turned toward the hallway, heading for the guest study. She hurried after me, catching the sleeve of my Oxford shirt. "Andrew, don't be stubborn. I know it’s a shock. But when the baby is born, it’s ours. He’ll call you Dad. He’ll have your name on his birth certificate. Philip won't even be in the picture." I stopped at the threshold and looked back over my shoulder. "And what about when you look at him?" "What?" "When you lie next to me at night, are you going to remember how he was made?" Every drop of color drained from her face. I pulled my arm free. "Because I will." I slept on the narrow sofa bed in the study that night. At two in the morning, the latch clicked open. Megan stood in the doorframe, hugging a feather pillow to her chest, her dark hair tumbling over an oversized sweater. "The master bedroom feels cold," she whispered. In the past, that single admission was my undoing. No matter how heated our argument had been, I would have thrown the duvet back and pulled her in until her toes were warm against my shins. I stared at her through the dark. "Turn on the thermostat." She didn't move. "Shut the door on your way out, Megan." She stared at me for a long, heavy beat, waiting for the capitulation that didn't come. Finally, she whipped the door shut, the rattle echoing through the quiet house. She probably thought I was having a standard jealous fit. She had no idea that beneath the sheets, my screen was already glowing with search results for divorce attorneys. ... Around noon the next day, Megan’s mother, Eleanor, called to invite us over for Sunday dinner. I initially refused, but Megan was already waiting by the front door when I walked down the stairs. She’d put on light makeup, wearing a soft camel-colored knit dress I’d bought her for our anniversary last autumn, behaving as if the previous night were simply a bad dream best forgotten. "Mom heard you’ve been under a lot of stress," Megan said, adjusting her pearl earrings in the mirror. "She made that short rib stew you like." I glanced toward her midsection. "Does she know whose baby it is?" Megan’s hand stilled. "Yes." "Since when?" "About a month ago." I didn't ask another question. Of course. In the theater of my own marriage, I was the only one in the cheap seats, receiving the script after the final curtain. The dining room at the elder house was crowded. Her parents, her older sister, and sitting across from them, Philip. When I stepped past the foyer, Philip was leaning across the linen tablecloth, peeling a fresh mandarin orange for Megan. He was meticulously stripping away the white, fibrous pith with his thumbnail, placing the clean segments one by one into a small china saucer. Megan picked up a slice without looking. "Is it tart?" "The ones from the market yesterday were sour. This batch should be sweet," Philip said, a comfortable half-smile on his mouth. "You're picky these days." I stood motionless on the hardwood between the entrance and the dining room. A sudden, sharp detachment washed over me. I wasn't the master of the house arriving with his wife. I was a tardy, inconvenient guest crashing someone else's domestic routine. Eleanor spotted me first, quickly wiping her hands on an apron and waving me in. "Andrew, darling, sit! Come sit." She nudged me into the chair beside Megan. Philip sat directly on Megan's other side. Midway through dinner, Megan’s father, Robert, cleared his throat and raised his wine glass. "Andrew," the old man began, his tone heavy with paternal magnanimity. "What's in the past is in the past. The most important thing is health. You survived the crash, and now there’s a grandchild on the way. Don’t hold onto old bitterness." My glass remained untouched on the tablecloth. "What past, Robert?" The clinking of silverware abruptly ceased. Beneath the hem of the tablecloth, Megan’s boot tapped against my shin in warning. Eleanor hastily intervened, smoothing the air with nervous hands. "He just means your recovery, dear. Now that Megan is expecting, the gossip will dry up naturally. What matters is the two of you building a life together. That’s bigger than anything." I scanned the faces around the table—the practiced smiles, the patronizing sympathy. "The child isn't mine." Megan’s head snapped toward me. "Andrew!" Eleanor’s smile cracked. Across the table, Philip set his fork down with a faint clatter. Only Robert's expression turned rigid with patriarchal displeasure. "We're family here. Do you really have to drag this out in such poor taste?" "Family?" I turned my head slowly to look Philip dead in the eye. "Then what is he?" Philip didn't flinch. "The biological donor," he answered quietly. Level. Unapologetic. Megan instantly dropped her hand onto Philip's wrist. "Stop it, Philip. Don't." The gesture was smooth, unthinking, and utterly practiced. It belonged to an intimacy that had outlived my presence. I watched her hand on his forearm for two long seconds. Megan caught the trajectory of my gaze and snatched her fingers back as if the skin burned. "Andrew, don't read into that." A soft, dead chuckle escaped my lips. "How should I read it?" Megan’s cheeks flushed a furious pink. "This is a family dinner. Do you have to cause a scene here?" "A scene." Ever since the test had dropped onto the coffee table, the only narrative she seemed able to grasp was that I was being unreasonable. No one around this table cared that I had been cuckolded under the banner of charity; they only cared that I was ruining the dessert course. The food turned to sawdust. I stood up, pushing my chair back with an ugly scrape against the floorboards. Megan’s older sister cleared her throat tentatively. "Andrew." I stopped, my hand on the back of the chair. "Megan's pregnancy hasn't been smooth," her sister offered, her voice dipping into that cautious tone used for volatile children. "Whatever grievances you have, don't upset her. Her progesterone was dangerously low at the ultrasound last week." My knuckles tightened on the mahogany wood. "Last week?" Megan’s face went translucent. Her sister realized she’d breached a dam and quickly looked down at her plate. I looked back at Philip. "You drove her to the clinic?" Philip didn't deny it. Megan gripped her cloth napkin in both fists. "You were in Chicago on business!" "Did you pick up the phone?" I asked. "Did you dial my number once?" "I didn't want to hurt you!" I nodded slowly. It was brilliant, really. A masterstroke of a defense. She opened her legs to another man to spare my feelings. She concealed the resulting life in her belly to spare my feelings. She let the biological father hold her hand through the cold gel of the first sonogram to spare my feelings. She had made a thousand calculations on my behalf. The only thing she had forgotten to ask was if I wanted any of it. I grabbed my jacket off the entryway coat rack. Megan caught up to me on the front porch, the autumn chill sweeping between our bodies. "Andrew, what do you want from me?" I stopped on the top step. Her eyes were rimmed with frantic tears. "I told you Philip has no legal claim! Why are you obsessing over these petty details?" I looked at her, searching the lines of the face I had kissed every morning for seven years. "You really think our marriage ending is a petty detail, Megan?" Her lips parted, trembling, but no sound came out. I didn't give her the chance to find the words. I walked down the brick path to my car. When I arrived back at the apartment that night, an architectural blueprint was rolled out on the study desk. Taped to the edge was a swatch of nursery wallpaper with a neat label: "The Eden Nursery." Next to it lay a brand-new pregnancy journal. On the line designated for the father's name, Megan’s neat, sloping cursive had already filled it in: "Andrew Eden." I sat under the desk lamp for a long time, staring at the ink. Then, taking a thick black marker from the cup, I drew line after heavy line across my name until the paper tore under the nib. ... On the third day, Philip rang our doorbell. When the door swung open, his hand was still mid-air, a startled flicker crossing his eyes. "Is Megan awake?" "She's resting." He extended a white pharmacy bag toward me. "Her morning sickness has been severe. The obstetrician prescribed these anti-nausea tablets. They’re safe for the fetus." I didn't lift a hand to take it. "You seem very well-informed." Philip stood on the doormat, his jaw tightening slightly. "Andrew, I know how this looks to you. But it isn't what you think." "Really?" I leaned against the frame, crossing my arms. "Enlighten me. You two drafted a schedule, had neat, transactional sex, conceived a child, and shook hands afterward like business partners?" Philip’s mouth hardened. "Don't talk about her like that." The absurdity of it finally snapped something inside me. "My wife is carrying your bastard in her belly, you’re standing on my threshold playing the dutiful provider, and you’re telling me not to insult her?" The bedroom door clicked open behind me. Megan padded into the foyer barefoot, her hair tangled, looking pale and fragile. "Stop it," she whispered. She looked at Philip first. "Go home." Philip didn't budge. "I’m not leaving you alone while he's like—" "I told you to leave, Philip!" she screamed, the register of her voice cracking with raw hysteria. Philip hesitated, then finally stepped back toward the elevator bank. Once the heavy door clicked shut, Megan leaned her back against the hallway wall, breathing hard. "Are you happy now? He was only trying to help." "Help?" I repeated, the word tasting like ash. "Megan, did you forget you have a husband?" She closed her eyes. "I didn't forget." "Then what about the night you two did it?" Her spine went rigid. I had barely slept forty-eight hours. The math had been chewing through my skull like acid. Twelve weeks. If you counted the days backward on a calendar, it aligned with a specific, unforgettable night. The night she peeled me off the barroom floor. The night she pulled off my tie, calling me an idiot, her eyes wet with tears as she kissed my mouth. I had been so drunk I couldn't stand upright. I had sobbed into her neck, telling her I was sorry, that I might never give her a child of her own. And Megan had cupped my cheeks in her small, cool hands and whispered: "Do you really think I need a baby to love you?" That single sentence had pulled me back from the edge of the abyss. I stepped closer to her. "It was that night, wasn't it?" She didn't speak. The silence was the only confession I needed. "After I passed out in our bed, you drove over to his place?" The last trace of blood vanished from her lips. "Andrew..." A wave of nausea hit me so violent I had to steady myself against the console table. I remembered waking up around three in the morning that night, parched and dizzy. The other side of the king mattress had been cold. I assumed she was downstairs pouring a glass of water. When my eyes opened again near dawn, she was curled against my ribs. Her back had been turned to me. When I reached out to draw her close, her body had seized with tension before she turned around, burying her face into the hollow of my throat. I remembered the faint, foreign scent of soap on her skin. Citrus and cedar. Philip's brand. "You tracked your cycle," I said, my voice dead and low. Megan’s chin quivered, tears finally spilling over. "The doctor said it was the peak window." "So you tucked me in, waited until I was unconscious, and went to his bed." "It wasn't like that!" she sobbed, her voice breaking. "I meant every word I said to you that night! Seeing you on the floor, calling yourself useless... it broke my heart, Andrew! I couldn't bear to watch you tear yourself apart anymore! I just wanted to end it! I wanted to fix it!" I stared at her. The cavity behind my ribs felt hollowed out with a rusted spoon. It was all real. Her tears had been real. Her kiss had been real. Her devotion had been entirely sincere. And then, while I slept off my grief, she had put on her coat and driven across town to let another man plant his seed inside her body. Megan stepped toward me, hands outstretched. "I didn't betray my love for you! When I came back to our bed, when I held you, you were the only one in my head!" I knocked her hands away with a violent jerk of my forearm. "Don't touch me." She looked down at her empty hands, stunned, as if she couldn't register the physics of my rejection. "Andrew... please, don't look at me like that." I had never spoken to her in that tone in seven years. I reached down to my left hand. The platinum band came off slowly, catching slightly on the knuckle. Beneath it, the skin was pale, indented with the shape of a promise I had worn every second of our adult lives. I placed the ring on the marble console table with a soft, definitive click. Megan’s gaze dropped to the metal. Her breath hitched. "Why are you taking that off?" "It chafes." She froze, completely struck dumb. That night, I packed a single carry-on suitcase. Megan sat on the edge of the mattress, her hands folded in her lap, watching my silhouette move between the dresser and the closet. She didn't try to block the door. In her mind, this was just another flare-up. I would spend forty-eight hours in an upscale hotel, exhaust my outrage, and return home with a bouquet of peonies and an apology. Every single time we had fought in the past, I was the one who broke the silence. I was the one who couldn't bear the coldness between us. She knew how deeply I loved her. And because of that, she never imagined that even a bottomless well can eventually run dry. ... A few days later, I drove to the medical center for my six-month post-accident assessment. My intention had been purely administrative: get the baseline scan, sign the insurance releases, and leave. The urologist flipped through the high-resolution imaging, cross-referencing it with my emergency intake files from the night of the crash. Suddenly, he pushed his spectacles up his nose and frowned. "Mr. Eden, why does your intake questionnaire state you have permanent, irreversible sterility?" I stopped mid-breath. "Excuse me?" "You had severe pelvic trauma and nerve compression," he explained, tapping the screen with the tip of his pen. "The statistical odds of spontaneous recovery were low, but nobody in this department ever signed off on permanent sterility. Your discharge summary explicitly noted an interim six-month evaluation to monitor tissue regeneration." He turned the monitor toward me. The latest bloodwork and ultrasound scans painted a clear picture. The vascular pathways had cleared; the hormonal markers were surging back toward standard baselines. The doctor gave an encouraging, professional smile. "Given these recovery metrics, conceiving naturally in the future is well within the realm of possibility." The room seemed to tilt on its axis. A high-pitched whine filled my ears. "But I have the official diagnostic letter," I rasped, pulling up the saved image on my phone with shaking fingers. On the third morning after I woke up in the intensive care unit, Megan had pressed that printed document into my hands with tear-stained cheeks. "Permanent loss of reproductive viability due to severe trauma. Zero probability of natural conception." The specialist squinted at the screen for two seconds, his eyebrows drawing together in immediate disdain. "This isn't our clinic's letterhead format. And the diagnostic conclusion directly contradicts the clinical logs from your attending surgeon." I sat in the vinyl chair, completely paralyzed. Six months. For six months, that single piece of forged paper had hung around my neck like a millstone. Every stray comment from colleagues about their children had felt like a needle sliding into my ribs. I had spent nights staring at the bedroom ceiling until the gray dawn broke, wondering what kind of man I was supposed to be now. At my lowest point, I had drunk myself into an emergency room with acute gastric bleeding. Megan had sat by my hospital bed, stroking my hair, scolding me with tender ferocity: "Andrew, pull yourself together. So what if you can't have kids? I'm not leaving you." Back then, I had wept with gratitude, believing she was the angel keeping me tethered to this earth. Now the sickening truth settled in. She had known all along that my body was still fighting for itself. And she had watched me sign my own psychological death warrant anyway. ... I drove back to the brownstone with the medical report burning a hole in my passenger seat. The scent of simmering beef broth filled the hallway when I unlocked the front door. Megan poked her head out from the open-concept kitchen, an apron tied around her waist. "You're back just in time," she called out softly, her tone carrying a careful, peace-offering warmth. "Come taste this. Does it need more thyme?" I walked to the dining table and laid the unfolded report flat against the polished wood. Megan walked over, a wooden spoon still in her hand. As her eyes scanned the clinical header and the bolded summary, the faint smile dropped from her lips. "Where did you get that initial diagnosis, Megan?" I asked quietly. She didn't answer. "The surgeon never declared me permanently sterile," I said, each syllable carved from ice. "Why did you fabricate it?" A long, suffocating silence filled the room, punctuated only by the hum of the refrigerator. Finally, she whispered, "You went for the follow-up?" That was all the confirmation I needed. "You knew," I stated. Megan dropped the wooden spoon onto the table. It rolled, leaving a smear of grease on the surface. "Andrew, listen to me. The surgeon said the odds were under ten percent. Every single morning you woke up obsessing over that tiny sliver of hope. You were cycling between manic optimism and suicidal despair, and watching you crumble was tearing me apart!" "So you put me out of my misery?" She bit her lower lip until it turned white. "Philip knew an administrative clerk in the records department. He had it drafted." Philip. Always Philip. My hands clenched into fists in my coat pockets. "We didn't do it to hurt you!" she pleaded, taking a step toward me. "Philip pointed out that dangling false hope would destroy you slowly. It was better for you to accept the absolute worst, grieve it, and move forward. If your body miraculously healed later, finding out then would just be a wonderful surprise, wouldn't it?" I looked at her, truly seeing the architecture of her mind for the first time. "So the two of you held a committee to decide when I was allowed to grieve, and when I was permitted to be happy?" Her eyes welled with immediate tears. "I just wanted you to stop torturing yourself!" "Then why didn't you speak up when I was vomiting blood in the ER?" Megan’s mouth worked, but no words came out. "When I held you at three in the morning, asking if my life was functionally over, why didn't you say something?" A tear spilled down her cheek. "I was terrified you’d relapse into that obsessive hope." A low, humorless laugh escaped my chest. She had watched me drown. She had counted every bubble that surfaced from my lips, knowing full well she had an anchor tied to my ankles that was forged from paper and ink. "And that night?" I asked, my voice dropping to a near-whisper. She blinked, startled. "What?" "The night you brought me home from the bar. When I begged you for forgiveness, crying into your neck because I thought I’d failed you as a husband. When you told me you didn't need a child." I took a half-step closer, forcing her to meet my eyes. "You knew the report was fake then, didn't you?" The blood left her face completely. After an unbearable pause, her head dipped in a tiny, wretched nod. "Yes." The last anchor severed inside my chest, leaving a cavernous, weightless silence behind. The cruelest part of that memory wasn't that she had slipped into Philip's bed hours later. It was that I had wept in her arms, mourning a future that was never actually dead, while she stroked my hair like a patronizing mother humoring a dying child. She had known the truth. And she had walked into the night anyway. Panicking at the utter stillness in my eyes, Megan lunged forward, catching the lapels of my coat. "Andrew, please. I never meant to destroy us! I thought once you accepted reality, our life could finally settle down. Even with the baby—I did it so the whispers would stop! So you wouldn't feel less than a man!" I took a slow step backward. Her fingers slipped off the wool, clawing at empty air. "Look at that," I murmured. "Everything you do is 'for me.'" The tears poured down her cheeks in rivers. "Andrew..." "You lied for me. You fucked your childhood friend for me. You got knocked up for me." I looked down at her. "Did it ever cross your mind, Megan, that I am an autonomous human being who didn't ask you to orchestrate my life?" She broke into ragged sobs, falling forward, her hands hovering near my wrists without daring to touch. "I was wrong. I swear I'll never make another decision without you. Please... don't look at me like I'm a stranger." In the past, her tears were a master key. They bypassed my defenses every single time. Now, looking at her weeping on the hardwood, all I felt was an overwhelming, leaden exhaustion. I laid the new medical report back down on the counter. "Megan." She looked up, her red-rimmed eyes grasping for a sliver of mercy. I looked at her, my voice steady, stripped of rage, and utterly cold: "I want a divorce."