Long enough to hope.
Then I started bleeding at work, in the bathroom on the fourth floor, and a woman from accounting found me sitting on the floor of the handicapped stall and called Thomas for me because I couldn’t hold my phone steady enough to dial.
The specialist’s name was Dr. Okafor. She had gray braids pulled back into a bun, and she didn’t do the thing some doctors do where they look at the chart instead of your face.She looked right at me.
“Emily,” she said. “I want to be honest with you, because I think you’d rather have honesty than hope that isn’t real.”
Thomas took my hand under the desk.
She explained it slowly. The scarring. The shape of things inside me that I’d never known were the wrong shape. Words like structural and high-risk and not viable. She drew a little diagram on a notepad. I stared at the diagram. It looked like a bad drawing of a pear.
“So what you’re saying,” Thomas said, “is that it’s hard.”
Dr. Okafor looked at him. Then she looked back at me.
“What I’m saying is that carrying a pregnancy to term is almost impossible for you. Not completely. I never say completely. But almost.”Almost.
I remember nodding. I remember saying, “Okay.” I remember saying, “Thank you for being straight with us.” I remember shaking her hand at the end, like we’d just finished a job interview.
