What We Carried

"I can't undo it... I shouldn't have, in the first place..." Terri Malone's mind raced as she barely made it to the sink. The nausea was becoming too familiar. It has been haunting her for ten weeks. Ten weeks since she let Martin drive her home after the office holiday party at the Doheney Four Seasons. They should have said their goodbyes at the door---no, in the car---and Terri should have turned the key to her apartment immediately. She did, but Martin insisted on coming in. The framed photo of Terri and a dark-haired man with almond-shaped eyes and an angelic smile did not faze him.

The water ran cold against her trembling hands. Terri avoided her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the same way she'd been avoiding Liam's calls all week. Three missed FaceTime attempts. Two voicemails she couldn't bring herself to listen to. He was in Singapore until next month—another reason Martin's timing had been so devastatingly convenient.

She remembered that night in fragments. The champagne—too much champagne. Martin's hand on the small of her back. The way he'd laughed at everything she said, making her feel witty and desired in a way she hadn't felt in months. Liam had been gone for six weeks by then, and the loneliness had carved out a hollow space inside her.

"Just one more drink," Martin had said at her door. "I don't want the night to end yet."

The photo of Liam had watched from the bookshelf as Martin moved closer on the couch. It had watched as she failed to stop him when his hand found her knee. It had witnessed every moment of her weakness.

"You okay in there?" Her roommate Chloe knocked softly.

"Fine," Terri managed, her voice cracking.

She wasn't fine. She hadn't been fine since the stick turned pink, since the second test confirmed what her body had been screaming every morning. The paper bag from the pharmacy was still crumpled under her bathroom sink, hidden like evidence of a crime.

Martin had texted her twice since that night. Once the next morning with a winking emoji that made her stomach turn. Once last week: Drinks? She'd blocked his number after that, but she still saw him every day in the break room, his easy smile a constant reminder of her betrayal.

Liam's face stared at her from the phone screen when she finally emerged from the bathroom. The photo had been taken last summer at his parents' house in Portland, both of them squinting into the sun. They'd talked about marriage. About the house they'd buy in Irvine with the good school district. About names—Leslie for a girl, Edward for a boy.

The irony wasn't lost on her.

Terri sank onto her bed, hand instinctively moving to her still-flat stomach. Ten weeks. She had options. She also knew that every day she waited, those options narrowed, and the weight of the decision grew heavier.

Her phone buzzed. Liam again.

Miss you. Can't wait to see you next month. Been thinking about what you said about taking that trip to Kyoto. I looked at flights.

The tears came then, hot and ashamed, blurring his words on the screen. He was making plans. Their future was a bright line stretching ahead of him, unbroken and full of promise. He didn't know that she'd taken a razor to it, that she'd cut through three years of trust and love in a single champagne-hazed hour of weakness.

Chloe appeared in the doorway with chamomile tea, asking no questions. She'd been Terri's roommate long enough to know when silence was the only kindness that mattered.

"I have to tell him," Terri whispered.

"Do you?"

The question hung in the air between them. Could she possibly carry this secret through a pregnancy, through birth, through a lifetime? Could she look Liam in those gentle eyes and lie about whose child grew inside her?

Terri thought about Martin—the office charmer with a different date every quarter, who'd probably suggest the easiest solution without a second thought. Then she thought about Liam, who'd shown her photos of the bassinet his mother had saved from his childhood, who'd already picked out a pediatrician near the house they didn't even own yet.

The nausea returned, but this time it had nothing to do with hormones.

She picked up her phone and opened a new message to Liam. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Three years. They deserved more than a text. They deserved more than any of this.

Call when you can. I need to talk to you about something important.

The message sent before she could overthink it. The blue checkmark appeared. Then the three dots that meant he was typing.

Everything okay? You're scaring me.

Terri closed her eyes. No, she wanted to type. Nothing is okay. I've destroyed everything we built.

Instead, she wrote: Just call me. Please.

Calling now.

Chloe squeezed her shoulder and left, giving her privacy for what would be either the end of everything or some impossibly painful new beginning.

Outside her window, the Los Angeles twilight painted the sky in shades of amber and regret. Somewhere in Singapore, Liam was waking up to a morning that would change everything. And in her womb, a cluster of cells divided and multiplied, indifferent to the chaos blooming around it.

The phone rang.

Terri stared at his name on the screen, at the photo of them together, at the future she'd betrayed. Her thumb hovered over the green button. This was it. The moment where she either saved herself with a lie or destroyed them both with the truth.

She answered the call.

"Hey, you," Liam's voice came through, warm and concerned. "What's wrong? Talk to me."

Terri opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

"Ter? You're freaking me out. What's going on?"

She looked at the photo on her nightstand one more time—his angelic smile, those gentle eyes. Then she closed her eyes and spoke.

"Liam, I need to tell you something, and it's going to hurt."

The silence on the other end stretched for three heartbeats. Then: "Okay. I'm listening."

His voice had changed already, gone cautious and guarded.

"I made a mistake. A terrible mistake. The night of the holiday party, after we talked—" She stopped, swallowed hard. "Martin gave me a ride home."

"Martin from your office."

"Yes." Terri pressed her palm against her stomach. "He came inside. I let him come inside, and I shouldn't have, but I was lonely and I'd had too much to drink and—" The words tumbled out now, desperate and jagged. "And I slept with him, Liam. I cheated on you. I'm so sorry."

The sound that came through the phone wasn't quite a word. It was something between a gasp and a groan, the sound of someone taking a punch to the gut.

"When?" His voice was barely above a whisper.

"Ten weeks ago. The night of the party."

"Ten weeks." He said it slowly, like he was testing the weight of it. "You've known for ten weeks and you're just telling me now?"

"I wanted to tell you. I tried so many times—"

"But you what, Terri?" The anger was coming now, hot and sharp. "You couldn't find the time? You couldn't type it out in one of your good morning texts?"

She was crying now, silent tears streaming down her face. "I know. There's no excuse. But there's more."

"More? How could there possibly be more?"

"I'm pregnant."

The silence that followed was absolute. Terri could hear her own heartbeat, could hear the distant sound of traffic through his hotel window seven thousand miles away.

"Is it mine?" His voice was hollow now, scraped clean of emotion.

"No." The word came out small and broken. "No, it can't be. The timing—"

"So you're pregnant with his baby."

"Yes."

"Does he know?"

"No."

She heard him moving, the creak of a chair, something being set down hard on a table. When he spoke again, his voice was different—not angry, not hollow, but defeated.

"I keep replaying every conversation we've had for the past ten weeks. Every time you said you loved me. Every time I told you about the house listings, the furniture—" He laughed, but it was a bitter sound. "The nursery. Remember? I sent you that photo of the room that would be perfect for a nursery."

"Liam—"

"Did you think about telling me then? When I was talking about our future children and you were carrying someone else's?"

Terri had no answer. The truth was yes, she'd thought about telling him then, and she'd chosen not to.

"What do you want from me, Terri? Why are you telling me now?"

"Because I love you. Because you deserve the truth. Because I can't live with this lie."

"You've been living with it for ten weeks."

"I know."

"You love me." He said it flatly, examining the words for meaning and finding them empty. "You love me, but you slept with someone else. You love me, but you're pregnant with his baby. You love me, but you lied to me every single day for ten weeks."

Each accusation was a knife, and each one was true.

"I need time," Liam said finally. "I need to think. I can't—I can't do this right now."

"Okay."

"I have meetings all day. I'll call you tomorrow. Or the next day. I don't know."

"Liam, please—"

"What? What else is there to say right now?"

Everything, Terri wanted to scream. That she was sorry. That she'd give anything to undo it. That she understood if he never wanted to see her again.

But all she said was, "I love you."

The pause before he responded felt like years. "I don't know if that means anything anymore."

The line went dead.

Terri sat in the growing darkness, the phone still pressed to her ear, listening to the silence where his voice had been. Chloe appeared in the doorway and came to sit beside her without a word.

"He hung up," Terri whispered.

They sat together in the darkness as the night deepened around them. Somewhere in Singapore, Liam was staring at the walls of his hotel room, trying to make sense of a world that had just stopped making sense. And here in Los Angeles, Terri was learning what it meant to live with the full weight of your choices.

Her phone buzzed once. A text from Liam: I need you to get tested. For STDs. And send me the results.

It was practical, clinical, and somehow that hurt more than anything else.

I will. I already did. All negative. I'll send you the results.

The dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again. Finally: What are you going to do about the pregnancy?

I don't know.

You need to figure it out.

I know.

I can't be part of this decision. You understand that, right? This is your choice.

She understood. She understood that she'd forfeited the right to his partnership in this. She understood that whatever she decided, she'd be deciding alone. She understood that the future they'd planned—the house in Irvine, Leslie or Edward, the life they'd mapped out in careful detail—was gone.

I understand.

No response came. Terri set the phone down and let Chloe pull her into a hug. She cried then, really cried, for everything she'd lost and everything she'd destroyed and everything she still had to face.

Tomorrow, she'd have to decide about the pregnancy. Tomorrow, she'd have to figure out how to move through the world as this new version of herself—the cheater, the liar, the woman who'd thrown away everything good for one thoughtless night. Tomorrow, she'd have to see Martin in the break room and know that he'd planted a consequence inside her that would last a lifetime, whether she kept it or not.

But tonight, she just cried.