It was late at night at the airport where I was waiting to be picked up. Red and white lights twinkled from airplanes, from towers. I was tired. With my carry-on in one hand and my work bag in the other, I searched the line of cars as blood soaked through my pad.

“Can I go through that?” I asked the TSA agent at the body scanner, three days earlier. “I’m pregnant!”

I had just found out I was halfway through the first trimester. I didn’t know what to tell my friends and family, but I loved to share the news with strangers. I’d also told the head of HR at the design agency where I worked.

“I think I’ll need an intern... or a boss?” I said.

I’d joined the agency as their 28-year-old intern, and not even a year later, I was managing all the brand strategy and copywriting projects mostly on my own, while occasionally reporting to the chief marketing officer.

“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” the HR manager answered.

I told her I understood. It was the second year of the pandemic, and we’d just come off another wave of layoffs and lost business. I was grateful to be employed, and to have the health insurance that came with it, but my heart hammered in my chest whenever I thought about balancing this job with pregnancy, and maybe later, motherhood.

Sitting on the tarmac at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, the three days in Cincinnati stretched gloomily before me. Even so, I couldn’t deny how free I felt heading away from home.

“I’m telling you,” the father said before I left. “If you get an abortion, we’re done.”

I held my tongue a lot back then, so I didn’t mention I had scheduled one the day after my first prenatal appointment. I wanted this baby, but I was unsure if we would be able to co-parent together, or if I could figure out how to balance work and parenting on my own. And while I waited to see which reality would reveal itself first, I took my prenatal vitamins and let myself — when I usually don’t let myself — be excited.

“It’s our first trip together,” I sang to the baby in the shower in the Airbnb in Cincinnati. The bathroom’s yellow light shone on the curve of my stomach. I imagined the curve expanding and the baby growing in there. It would be a lie if I said it didn’t make me feel a little less lonely.

The next morning, I walked to the office downtown. Pregnancy meant I could smell everything. Intensely. It was a few days before Halloween, and I was overpowered by the scent of fallen leaves, the soil, the soil inside the soil, and in the air, I smelled the hints of the summer that had left and the winter that was to come.

“This is a big deal, you guys,” the CMO said. He and my favorite co-worker, a creative director, had also flown in so we could join the three men on the Cincinnati team. While the CMO and the creative director were on other projects, I’d be leading an important meeting for a new client — one of our first after a string of rejected business proposals and frozen projects.

Despite the small number of clients, we were still swamped with work, and through the course of the day, the in-person meeting was moved to Zoom, and, one by one, the Cincinnati team could no longer attend the call.

“It’ll just be you,” the CMO said.

“All good,” I answered, and gave my stomach a small hug. I pictured the eyelash, the lentil, growing in there.

“No, you all go ahead. I don’t really want to go out,” I tried to beg off. My legs ached, and I longed to go to bed, as happy hour plans were being made.

“Why? Are you pregnant or something?” the Cincinnati designer asked. Evading a direct answer, I smiled and kept smiling as we went from bar to bar, the sticky beer smell running rancid in my nose.

I woke up the next morning and something was off. My heightened sense of smell — it was gone. I went to use the bathroom and heard a splash. What had fallen was brown, and small, and shaped like a thumb. Blood spun like lace in the water.

No amount of research convinced me whether this was “normal light spotting” or something more........

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