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“I haven’t slept with anyone else.”
She needed the seventh week to arrive so she could get the paternity test. She needed him to know. For more than just herself. The man was meant to be a father. She wanted it for him. Even though it messed up her idea of what her future family was going to look like.
She hadn’t figured on a live father in the picture...
“And there could have been a mix-up at the clinic. Maybe a PA injected you as opposed to getting cultures when you were in for testing.”
The thought had occurred to her—because it was the only other possibility for a pregnancy within her. No one else had been near her space. But he was a doctor. He knew the unlikelihood of such an unprofessional and disastrous mistake. Too many checks and balances were in place for a mistake like that to happen. He was really grasping at straws. To the point that she felt sorry for him. And a bit hurt again, too. Was the idea of even considering the possibility that she could be pregnant with his child so abhorrent to him?
Or had he just been disappointed one too many times?
“Did you watch the procedure?” he asked, his gaze serious, and completely clear, as he looked at her.
“No.” She’d done what she always did when being examined—turned her head, stared at the wall and put her mind on something else. On the day he was referencing, five weeks before, that last argument with Peter had sprung to mind and she’d spent the entire time hoping that having Peter’s baby would somehow add a bit of salve to the egregio
us wound she’d unknowingly helped create. The exam had been somewhat painful, as her uterus had to be manipulated, and...
Elaina stared at her tablet, at the still blank screen.
And something occurred to her, causing her heart to jump a beat. She’d had to switch exam rooms that morning. The computer in the room she’d been in hadn’t been working.
And then the system had gone down for a short time.
Was it possible that someone had mistaken her for another patient? One who had a painful exam, thinking she was being fertilized, and ended up not pregnant on that try?
The ramifications blew up in her mind’s eye as she felt herself flush, then shiver.
Looking at Greg, she didn’t realize that she was silently asking for reassurance until he said, “I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now, but I’m here if you need to talk.”
What she needed was to stop scaring herself and get him to understand that he was the father of her baby.
To get away from the misplaced, warm compassion searing her from his gaze, she turned her head, saw the test results on his desk, and took a deep breath.
Clearly, she had to have a fetal paternity test. But...
“I know it’s hard to accept, a clinic as renowned as The Parent Portal making a mistake, but they happen, Elaina.”
She shook her head. Clearing it as best she could. She didn’t want an unknown man’s sperm in her body. She’d made that decision early on: it would have to be Peter’s, or no insemination.
But she wanted the baby growing inside her. Right then and there, her pregnancy became completely real to her as she was hit with how badly she wanted that child.
How she’d already wrapped her heart around it.
She hadn’t wanted the baby to be Greg’s, but she’d been falling in love with it, knowing it was his. So shouldn’t she be equally accepting of an anonymous donor? It wasn’t like she’d been expecting anything from Greg.
Greg picked up his tablet, turned it on, swiped and poked until the spreadsheet they’d been working on came up. They’d used a yellow highlighter to show charting discrepancies. Meds ordered and meds taken didn’t always gel. There was a handful of such instances, one during the time that Brooklyn should have been getting medication through an IV.
He motioned toward the chart and said, “This isn’t my first time seeing something like this.”
His tone had changed, and she looked over at him.
“I lost a patient in Las Vegas,” he told her. She knew he’d come from a major hospital there. But she knew very little other than that he’d been an internist, had done a rotation in the ER and had liked it so much he’d changed his specialty.
“Many doctors do, if they stay in the business long enough,” she said softly. One of the reasons she’d chosen nuclear medicine as her specialty was so that she didn’t have her own patients, but rather, was able to help a much larger group of people. While she was fascinated by medicine and the way the human body worked, while she cared deeply about people and helping them, she just didn’t see herself wanting to stand in a room and deliver a difficult diagnosis.
The world was made up of all kinds of people, with varying strengths and weaknesses, for a reason.
“This one was due to medical error. She was a young teacher who’d come in for a simple procedure and ended up in a coma.”
