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I must have stared at those words for hours. Of course I said it back. He said what my heart had been screaming since that night at the hotel. Now that the words have been said aloud, they’re sinking in deeper by the day.
The only problem is, I haven’t heard from him in days. One day, out of the blue, Alejandro just stopped responding to my texts. It’s as if he’s dropped off the face of the planet. My thoughts have gone crazy more than once with every worst case scenario it can drum up. Then I have to temper them with assurances that he’s fine. Maybe he lost his phone. Maybe he’s busy.
Maybe he doesn’t want me anymore.
Maybe he never did.
Maybe Alejandro is a playboy like my shitty husband.
Or maybe I scared him off. During one of our many late-night texts, we discussed our kids and our future, and in a roundabout way, we ended up discussing the night we had sex. When he realized we were completely unprotected, he had a mini-freak-out moment just like I had. He recovered quickly, however, and told me that he’d be happy if I ended up pregnant, and then he launched a day’s long game of making me sweat. At random times throughout the day, I’d open my phone to a message that read:
Mami…
You pregnant
Or
Mami…
Do you want a girl or a boy?
Or
Mami…
You’re going to make me a dad soon
To say he got me flustered is an understatement, but as the days passed, I started to warm to the idea of one day having a baby with him. A little Latino baby with his glittering chocolate brown eyes and that devilish smile.
I want this man more than my next breath—but he’s gone. And I’m not going to make a fool of myself by reaching out to him again.
No matter how much I try to imagine never seeing him again, it feels wrong. I’ve learned to listen to my instincts closely. They know things my head and heart don’t. So even though I have my doubts, the bigger part of me is saying no, he’ll be back. Just you wait and see.
But I don’t have the luxury of waiting. The problem is, I have three kids who depend on me. I have a job I need to concentrate on so I can provide for them. I have responsibilities that won’t wait for me to pull myself together.
Motherhood doesn’t take a vacation.
And so I get up every day, shower, and get dressed. I send the kids off to school, work my job, clean the house, and cook dinner.
I check my phone for messages one hundred and eighty times a day. Not a single text from Alejandro.
It’s as if he never existed.
I find myself praying, asking the powers that be for a sign—any sign—that this isn’t the end. Confirmation that my instincts are on-point. Some days I feel like I’ve lost my mind. Other days I’m dead set on what it’s telling me to be true.
My confusion and stress are only compounded, though, when a few weeks pass, and I realize that I’m late.
My period, which normally operates like clockwork, decides to skip a day. And another. And another. Before I know it, I’ve used up three pregnancy tests—all negative—and I’m ten days late.
Despite what the tests say, my body doesn’t feel like my own. It’s become foreign to me, reminding me of when I was pregnant with my babies. The thing is, I very well could be pregnant now.
I don’t know how I feel about that, to be honest. My husband and I had long ago decided that we were done having kids. He got a vasectomy, and I looked toward the future, returning to school and launching my own business. Over the years, I watched friends and relatives having babies and, despite some brief longing for just one more of my own, I always pushed the desire to the back of my mind, knowing that it just wasn’t an option anymore.
Now, the prospect of being a mom again is staring me in the face.
“That asshole got you pregnant,” Jean rants over the phone. She’s been livid since the day he disappeared from my life. She even launched a one-woman investigation team to track him down. Only to find out that there just isn’t much information out there on a person who holds a Visa. They might as well be a ghost, for all the footprint they leave.
“We don’t know that.”
