Five months transform my body into something foreign and powerful, something that doesn't belong to me anymore. I carry the weight like a secret made visible, like my shame has taken physical form and decided to announce itself to everyone. My sweaters grow progressively larger as November bleeds into December, then January, February, and now March—oversized cardigans that used to look cute and academic but now just look like what they are: camouflage for a girl who fucked up her entire life.
Nathan has become a ghost story on campus. Jessica swears she still sees him—"I literally just saw him at the coffee shop," she'll say, or "He was in the philosophy section at the bookstore"—but he never materializes in my presence. He's mastered the art of existing in the same square mile without ever crossing my path. Sometimes I wonder if he has a map of my schedule, if he plans his routes to avoid me like I'm a natural disaster zone.
"You need to get a paternity test," Jessica says for the hundredth time, watching me struggle to tie my shoes around my bump. "This is fucking ridiculous. You can't just not know who the father is."
"After the baby's born," I tell her, the same answer I always give. Because how do I explain that I'm terrified of both answers? If it's Nathan's, I destroyed us for nothing. If it's the stranger's, then I'm having a baby with a ghost who smells like cedar and smoke.
The study group meets in the library's old wing, where the radiators clang like imprisoned spirits and the books smell like decay and knowledge—same thing, really. We're discussing the Romantic poets, how they found beauty in suffering, transcendence in pain. Keats died at twenty-five, I think, running my hand over my stomach. Byron fucked his half-sister. Maybe I'm more Romantic poet than I thought.
"Jasmine, what's your take on 'Ode to a Nightingale'?" Marcus asks, and I try to focus on my notes, on Keats's desire for easeful death, but the words start swimming on the page.
"I think," I start, but the room tilts sideways like someone's picked up the building and given it a shake. "I think he wanted to disappear into beauty, to become something other than human with all its—"
The world goes white at the edges, then black.
I wake to institutional white and that cologne—immediate, overwhelming, impossible.
Cedar and smoke, autumn nights and burnt paper, him, it's him, he's here—
My eyes fly open, heart racing, searching the room. But it's empty except for the standard hospital furniture and a bouquet of white orchids on the bedside table. They're too elegant for this sterile room, too expensive for a college student, too perfect to be real. I reach out to touch them, to make sure I'm not hallucinating, and they're cool and smooth under my fingers.
"You're awake." Nathan appears in the doorway like he's been summoned by my consciousness, disheveled in a way I've never seen him—shirt untucked, hair wild, carrying the particular panic of someone who ran across campus. "Thank God, you're awake."
"What are you doing here?" My voice comes out scratchy, confused.
"The nurse called me." He moves into the room, hesitant but determined. "I'm still your emergency contact. You never changed it."
I hadn't even thought about it. All those forms I'd filled out at the beginning of the year, back when Nathan was my everything, when I thought we'd be together forever. Back when I was still a virgin who believed in happy endings.
"You fainted in the library," he explains, his hand finding mine before I can pull away, warm and familiar and wrong. "They said it's normal—low blood pressure, dehydration, stress. The baby's fine."
The baby. The words hang between us like a question neither of us has been brave enough to answer.
"Nathan—"
"I've been an idiot." The words tumble out like he's been rehearsing them. "Three months of thinking, of hiding like a coward, and all I figured out is that I can't imagine my life without you."
"You left," I remind him, because someone has to. "You literally ran away."
"I know. I was scared. Twenty years old and suddenly facing fatherhood—I panicked. But Jasmine..." He squeezes my hand, and his green eyes are so earnest it hurts. "The baby—it's mine. It has to be. We'll make this work. I'll defer graduate school, get a job. We'll figure it out together."
The cologne lingers in the air, distinct from Nathan's usual smell of soap and laundry detergent and that pretentious sandalwood body wash. I tell myself it's the hospital, that disinfectant plays tricks with memory, that pregnancy hormones create phantom scents. The orchids stare at me like elegant eyes, knowing something I don't.
"You don't have to—" I start, but the door bangs open.
My mother enters like a force of nature, still in her work clothes, her face a masterpiece of controlled fury. Her gaze sharpens at the sight of Nathan holding my hand.
"So you finally showed up," she says, her voice could freeze hell.
Nathan actually flinches. "Mrs. Johnson, I'm sorry—"
"Sorry?" She laughs, but it's not a happy sound. "You abandoned my pregnant daughter when she needed you most, and you're sorry?"
"Mom, please—"
"I know," Nathan interrupts, straightening his shoulders. "I know I failed her. I failed both of them. But I'm here now. For good."
I watch this play unfold from my hospital bed like an audience member in my own life, my own tragedy. My mother's eyes narrow, calculating, planning. I know that look. It's the look she gets when she's about to rearrange reality to her specifications.
"Well then," she says, her next words slicing through the antiseptic air like a scalpel. "We need to discuss your engagement. I'll be calling your parents tonight."
"Engagement?" Nathan and I say in unison.
"You're having a baby together. You love each other. The solution is obvious." She pulls out her phone, already scrolling through contacts. "A small ceremony, family only. We can do it before you're showing too much—April would be perfect."
"Mom, we're twenty years old—"
"I was nineteen when I married your father." She looks at Nathan. "What's your parents' number?"
Nathan's hand tightens around mine, and I can feel his pulse racing. "Mrs. Johnson, we appreciate—"
"Do you love my daughter?"
"Yes, but—"
"Do you want to be a father to this baby?"
"Of course, but—"
"Then what's the problem?" She's already dialing. "Hello, Mrs. Pinch? This is Helen Johnson, Jasmine's mother. We need to talk about our grandchild."
I close my eyes, the smell of cedar and smoke still haunting the edges of my perception. The orchids seem to glow in the fluorescent light, beautiful and funereal all at once, like flowers for a wedding or a grave. Nathan's thumb strokes my hand in nervous circles, and I think about that stranger's hands, how they were steady and sure even in darkness.
"Everything's going to be okay," Nathan whispers, but it sounds like a question.
The orchids know better. The orchids know that some secrets grow like babies, inevitable and undeniable, until they're too big to hide anymore. The cologne lingers like a ghost, like a promise, like a bomb that hasn't exploded yet.
My mother is planning my wedding to a man who might not be the father of my child, while the actual father—maybe—remains a phantom who sends flowers that shouldn't exist, whose presence I can feel but can't see.
"Yeah," I lie, my hand on my stomach where the baby—Nathan's or the stranger's—continues to grow, indifferent to the chaos it's created. "Everything's going to be perfect."