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“You sure?” she asked after what felt like an eternity.
“Yes,” I said, my voice confident and strong.
“Good,” she said. “That’s what I was hoping.”
Did she believe me? It wasn’t clear. For all the confidence in my voice, hers was shaky and uncertain, as if every statement ended with a question mark.
“The message box loaded,” I said.
“Finally!” she exclaimed in a tone that only revealed how uncertain her previous words had been.
“Clicking on ‘Your Results’ now.”
The page continued to take forever to load, and I heard a persistent click on the other end of the phone. After a couple of seconds, I realized what it was: Mila tapping something — perhaps a pen — out of anxious excitement.
I could almost imagine her on the other end, biting her tongue and trying to avoid asking what it says, knowing full well that I would tell her as soon as I saw it, but still feeling that repeatedly asking would somehow get her the results faster.
“Okay,” I said, “here it comes.”
I scrolled down through the boilerplate at the top of the message and got to the results.
“Oh,” I said, unable to hide the obvious disappointment in my voice. I wanted to stop and sit with the results for a moment, but that wouldn’t be fair to Mila. “I’m not the father.”
“You’re not?”
“No.”
We both sat there on our respective ends of the telephone call, not saying a word for a while.
“Is it possible that there’s been a mistake?”
“No,” I said. That was a slightly misleading thing to say. While DNA was unique and, under ideal circumstances, there was no chance that the results would provide a false negative, labs were known to make errors from time to time. I’d seen it happen. It wasn’t a frequent occurrence, but it was common enough to almost always leave the possibility, or at least the illusion of hope.
But I also knew the lab that was working on this and, specifically, the technician put in charge of this particular analysis. She was excellent at her job and, on top of that, knew just how important this test was for me. She wasn’t going to half-ass it. If anything, she would have double checked with every precaution to ensure that she was providing accurate results.
And, in tests like these, a false positive — where the test would inaccurately say that I was the father when I really wasn’t — was much more likely than a false negative.
In other words, to an almost impossible certainty, I was sure that I was not the father.
“So you’re not the father.”
That was the first full sentence that Mila said during the entire conversation that sounded certain. And there was an implied follow up question that she wasn’t asking, and I was glad because I didn’t know the answer: What happens now?
True, we’d agreed that I should stick around and I had even promised to do so, but I couldn’t have accounted for the instant disappointment that filled my heart in learning that she was not pregnant with my baby. It would no longer be a little me that I was raising, but a little person that was half Mila and half complete stranger. Somebody neither of us had even met.
I was a man of my word and I’d stick around, not just out of human decency, but also because I cared so deeply about Mila. And, though we’d never said the words, I knew deep in my heart that I loved her and she trusted me. More than anybody I’d ever known.
And I wondered if that would be enough. Would love be enough to get us through this hurdle?
“That’s right,” I said with a sigh. “I’m not.”
At that moment, I suddenly became aware of the sounds outside the room and throughout my office. People talking with each other and going on throughout their day as if nothing had happened. Because, for them, nothing had happened. It was as unremarkable a day as any other. I couldn’t face them. I couldn’t face another patient and pretend to get excited about their future pregnancy and family when things in my life had taken such an immediate turn.
To hell with the rest of my patients. I was done for the day. And maybe the rest of the week.
I wanted to climb into a hole and hide from the world until everything passed, and that’s effectively what I was doing inside the office. Except I wasn’t completely hidden from the rest of the world because the phone call was still connected, and Mila was still on the other end.
But, for the first time in weeks, neither of us had anything to say to each other.
