And then there were the professional ramifications. Before I knew about the pregnancy, I’d just finished signing the paperwork for my next project, creating a tricky situation I had no idea how to navigate. I’d be more than four months along when we started shooting—I had to think I’d be showing by then, and a leading lady with a basketball belly was definitelynotwho they’d hired. Was I legally required to disclose I was expecting? Could they sue me for breach of contract? If they fired or replaced me, could I suethem? I had no idea where to turn for answers, and asking Joanne felt too risky. While she represented me and had a duty to me as her client, I wasn’tnaïve enough to think I was her only priority. She had her own relationship with the studio to protect, and when push came to shove, she had her own bills to pay.
And then there was Ryder.
It had been more than a month since we’d last seen each other. We’d parted ways in Seafolly with our three-week plan in place and the best of intentions, but life quickly got in the way. First, I had to prioritize finding an apartment and moving—no small feat when Joanne had me running all over town for screen tests and general meetings with producers and studio execs. For Ryder’s part, he soon learned that Graham Stroud ran a much less structured set than Nate. His shooting schedule was highly unpredictable—he might be slotted to film one day, only to find the timetable changed at the last minute, forcing him to shoot nights or make up time on the weekends. And when he finally did get a few days off, I sucked it up and encouraged him to fly down to Florida to be with his mom instead. She’d started her cancer treatments, and I knew how guilty he felt for not being there. As much as I missed him, I refused to be clingy or possessive when I knew Nora needed him more than me.
I was quickly learning that dating long distance was nothing like you saw in the movies. It sounded romantic in theory—late-night calls, handwritten letters, counting down the days until you’d meet again—but the reality was far less rosy. I ended up curating my life into neat little updates, sanitized and performative, editing out the loneliness I carried around like a constant companion.
But real intimacy lived in the margins—in dumb inside jokes and the spontaneous generation of silly nicknames; inpetty arguments about the right way to load a dishwasher, or the daily negotiation between an early bird and a night owl. It was learning the language of your person, memorizing their moods, reading their silences better than their words. Our separation had stripped away the texture of our daily life, all the little rituals and shared experiences that stitched the two of us together. I’d been naïve in Seafolly, thinking love was enough to hold us together across any distance. Love needed context, and we were struggling to hold on to it.
We messaged as much as we could and tried valiantly to keep our nightly FaceTime dates, but staying connected was hard, much harder than I thought it would be. Texting became our new normal, and I hated it. Navigating the time change was an ongoing nightmare. When Ryder was able to squeeze in a call over lunch or dinner, I was invariably busy in meetings or appointments. When things calmed down for me at night, he was either already asleep in preparation for an early call time or out “bonding” with his new castmates. I developed a love-hate relationship with my phone, so dependent on it for the crumbs of interaction we did get but frustrated by its limitations and how depressed and unsatisfied I felt when we hung up. I cried myself to sleep, dreamt of him, missed him so much I ached in places I didn’t know could hurt. I hid my unhappiness from him as much as I could, soldiering on with a brave face, not wanting him to worry about me or feel guilty when he was already being torn in so many directions.
But my tough-girl act evaporated the second I stepped out of my OB’s office. I needed to see him, and it couldn’t wait any longer.
That night on FaceTime, I was quiet as he relayed a storyabout the trouble some of his castmates had gotten into the night before, when he suddenly broke off mid-sentence. “Are you crying?”
“No,” I whimpered, the quiver in my voice instantly betraying the lie.
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
I dug a knuckle into the corner of my eye, the trickle of tears threatening to become a flood. “I just miss you,” I whispered, emotion tightening my throat. “We’ve let this go too long. I really need to see you.”
He was lying on his side in bed, a pillow bunched beneath his head, phone propped up against the headboard. I had a glorious view of his coiled biceps and bare torso, his sable eyes drowsy and sleep softened. I wanted to climb through the phone and curl into his arms, fall asleep with my cheek pressed to his chest, wrapped in the safe warmth of his embrace.
“I miss you too, Scar. I hate being away from you.” He looked troubled, guilt painting his features. “I wish I had known you were feeling this way. I didn’t realize you were so upset.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s just hard. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be,” I said in a small voice, the unspoken truth hovering somewhere between my heart and my mouth:I need you and you’re not here.
He scrubbed a hand down his face. “It’s probably screwed up to say this, but it’s kind of a relief to see you upset. You’ve seemed so…I don’t know, unfazed, like you’re taking everything in stride while I’ve been crawling out of my skin. I’ve been trying to match your energy.”
I blew out a watery breath. “I’m not as strong as you think I am, Ry.”
“You are.” He brought the phone a little nearer to his face, and I was treated to a close-up of his velvety eyes. His freckles had already started fading, and it made my heart twist. “Are you wearing my sweatshirt?”
I sniffled. “You know it’s my sweatshirt now.” It smelled like him, and some nights that was the only thing that helped me fall asleep.
His mouth curved, one of his cahoots smiles, and I let it wrap around me, warm me from the inside out. “Can you make it out here next Friday? I’ll make sure I’m not on the schedule. It’ll just be you and me, all weekend. We can explore Atlanta together.” His smile shifted into a suggestive smirk as he bit his lip. “Or the inside of my hotel room. Whatever works.”
I laughed half-heartedly at his joke, knowing we probablywouldbe spending a lot of time in his hotel room, only he’d be holding my hair back, and the only place I’d be exploring was the bathroom floor. Morning sickness and migraines didn’t exactly make for great foreplay.
As it was, I marveled over how quickly my body was changing. Despite all my time spent horizontal, I was constantly exhausted, often needing a nap by lunchtime. I woke up aching, my breasts tender and sore. I typically loved a good sweat session, but these days the only cardio I was getting was my daily sprint to the toilet. The sight and smell of certain foods I’d been fine with only last week now made me dry heave. The only thing I could seem to keep down were peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, making me wonder if part of preparing for motherhood was eating like a toddler.
During my more positive moments, I actually let myself get excited about the baby. I wondered if we’d have a little girlwith strawberry-blond hair like mine, or a chubby-cheeked towhead like Ryder. I felt a kinship with the moms I passed on the sidewalk, wrangling strollers and diaper bags without breaking stride. I imagined adding another grandbaby to the Everhart family brood, a world full of clutter and cousins and cheerful chaos. I imagined giving Nora another reason to fight through her painful treatments. I imagined Ryder cradling a newborn and felt like my heart might burst in my chest.
But at my lower moments, I worried.
I worried motherhood would end my career just as it was taking off. Women had a shelf life in this business, and my clock was already ticking. If things stalled, I’d be completely dependent on Ryder—a scary prospect on its own, not to mention a massive amount of pressure on him. And if they didn’t, we’d have to juggle childcare in an industry built on constant travel and long stretches apart. How would that even work? Would I stay home while he was off filming? Would he be willing to stay home whileIwas filming? Would he even want to trade off that way, or would he expect me to take a step back from my career? Would he want me to go on location with him, stuck with an infant in a tiny hotel room—or worse, a trailer? Or would I have to get used to a part-time partner who flew in on the weekends? Every option felt like a compromise I didn’t want to make. And those were only my work worries.
I worried Ryder wouldn’t want this baby the way I did. That instead of seeing it as a miracle, he’d see it as a mistake. I worried it was too much too fast, that becoming parents would put too much pressure on our young relationship. I worried he’d view our baby—and me—as an inconvenience, a roadblock on his path to success. He loved me, I knew he did, but Icouldn’t say for sure that he’d embrace this life change. What if he ended up resenting me? What if this broke us instead of brought us together? What if we couldn’t survive this?
We’d never even talked about whether he wanted to have children. Our childhoods couldn’t have been more different. I grew up in a tight-knit, rambunctious home surrounded by siblings, and knew I eventually wanted the same for myself; he was the only child of a single mom who moved around constantly. I didn’t know the specifics of the situation with his father, only that it was a sensitive subject he rarely discussed. My own dad had always been all-in, coaching our soccer teams, cheering loud and proud at my school plays, interrogating every date who dared show up at the door—and now I found myself pregnant by a man he’d never even met. It was hardly the way I’d envisioned introducing Ryder to my family.
One morning after a shower, I found myself staring into the mirror, searching my body for evidence of what was happening beneath the surface. I laid a hand over my stomach, still so deceptively flat, as if nothing had changed when absolutely everything had.
“He’ll be a good daddy, won’t he?” I whispered to my reflection. The silence felt like its own kind of answer.
For the next week I walked around with a permanent knot in my gut, like a secondary kind of nausea. I hated keeping the truth from Ryder. Since avoiding him was easier than lying, I found reasons to miss his calls and kept our FaceTimes short, telling him we’d make up for it soon enough. I hated how distant we were, but at least I had a finish line to look forward to.
When we did manage to connect, I tried not to notice how often his words were slurred, how his social life seemed tohave ramped up while mine had gone extinct. By now I knew he used alcohol as a crutch—a social lubricant, a tool to numb his nerves, a coping mechanism for his insecurities, a release valve for the pressure of his mom’s illness. His drinking hadn’t raised any red flags for me in Seafolly, but in Atlanta, something felt different. He said drinking helped him unwind, took the edge off, and I took him at his word, even if a quiet part of me had started to question how harmless his habit really was.
