or DeShawn, not the idea of being pregnant.
Oh my God, I was pregnant.
The thought sank into me as if it had suddenly seeped into my skin and settled inside my body. What was I going to do? I wished more than anything my mother was still here. She would know what to do, or at the very least, she would be here to comfort me and tell me that everything was going to be okay and that I wasn’t alone. But instead, it was just me. Just me hiding in the shower and wondering how in the world that any of this was going to be okay.
For starters, the farm was at a critical breaking point. Now was the time that I would need to work harder than ever if we had any hope of saving the farm. How was I supposed to do that if I was pregnant? I couldn’t even be that far along in the pregnancy, and I was already tired and sick to my stomach. That was surely only going to get worse. And Scott couldn’t handle the farm on his own, especially not heading into the winter months. This was a disaster.
And speaking of disasters, how in the hell was I supposed to tell my brother? He would know instantly that DeShawn was the father since I hadn’t been around any other man. He would know that I slept with his best friend and that I had lied to him about it. And how was I supposed to even tell DeShawn? Here he was, a successful billionaire coming back to his hometown and slumming it with his best friend’s farm-girl sister. I knew that he cared about me, but I didn’t know if he cared about me enough to deal with this situation. This was such a hot mess. The worst part was that it wasn’t something that I could just ignore in the hope that it would work itself out. There was literally no ignoring this situation.
I was pregnant.
I would start to show, and there would be no way to hide it. The longer that I tried to hide it, the more everyone would know that I had lied and kept it a secret. I had no idea what to do.
The shower water started to go from hot to warm, and I lost track of time as I became consumed by my thoughts and worries. I wasn’t going to anything right now. I was going to wait and keep this secret to myself until I had at least some idea of what to do. Right now, DeShawn and my brother were downstairs. They were probably having a beer and talking and waiting for me to come down for dinner. But I couldn’t see either of them tonight. I stood in the shower until the water turned cold, and even then, I stayed in longer.
By the time I finally turned the water off and got out, I figured that it had been long enough for DeShawn to have left. I was shivering uncontrollably as I reached for a towel, and when I looked into the mirror, I could see that my lips had turned blue. But even though I could see that my body was cold, I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t even feel hungry, although all that I had ingested today was a cup of coffee that I ended up throwing right back up. I was too numb from the shock of seeing a positive pregnancy test to feel anything at all.
Even if I decided to keep this baby, I was going to be absolutely awful at this. I could barely take decent care of myself as it was. I was constantly pushing myself too hard, not eating right or getting enough rest; hell—I just stood in a freezing cold shower for an hour. Pretty sure that wasn’t the best thing to do. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed and forget about today altogether. In the morning, I would go about the day as if none of this had happened, at least until DeShawn left town. Then I would have one less thing to contend with while I tried to figure out what was going to happen to my life now.
“Hey, Clara,” Scott’s voice called from downstairs. “You ready for dinner? I made it already since you were taking a marathon shower tonight.”
I centered myself so that my voice didn’t shake when I called back to him. “No thanks,” I called