This is part of an ongoing series. Start with Part 1.
I knew three days after it happened.
My body just felt different. I couldn't explain it — I just knew. I didn't say anything because it was too early for a test, and I wasn't ready to say it out loud yet.
Then one morning he was being an asshole in the shower. Criticizing, hovering, doing what he'd been doing since the day he moved in. And I just blurted it out.
I think I'm pregnant.
He went quiet immediately. Asked if I was sure. Said he'd go buy the tests.
That shift — from asshole to attentive in a single sentence — should have told me something. The moment I had something he wanted, the behavior stopped. Instantly. Like a switch.
Three days later we had a positive test. Multiple, actually — he made me take them over and over throughout the day, as if a different answer might appear.
Within the same conversation he was already talking about abortion.
This was the man who had told me over tacos that his ex-wife's abortion had devastated him. That it was something you just didn't do. That we were aligned on that — that it was one more thing we had in common, one more reason we made sense together.
Now, with a positive test in his hand, he pushed me to abort every single day.
He wasn't ready. He wasn't where he wanted to be financially. He had things he still wanted to do. Every reason was about him — his timeline, his plans, his comfort. Not once did he ask how I felt about any of it. Not once did the conversation include me as a person rather than a problem to be solved.
For weeks. Every day. As one last attempt to persuade me, he offered to buy the pill himself.
I told him I'd already bought it. That I'd looked at it. That I just couldn't do it. The thought of it was in my soul something I knew I couldn't do. Even at four weeks. I couldn't.
He went quiet.
Later — when it suited him — he used that against me. Told people I had tried to abort his child. And in the same breath he'd turn around and say there was no proof it was even his.
Both things at once. Every position designed to punish me. None of them consistent. All of them leaving me with nowhere to stand.
By August he was venting to his mother and other women about child support. About needing a lawyer. About what this was going to cost him.
I was carrying his child. He was calculating his liability.
Around September he finally found a place that fit the voucher requirements and moved most of his things out. But he didn't really leave. He kept clothes here. He was over almost every day at first. One foot in my apartment, one foot in his own space — which I didn't even know the address of. I figured it out from the keys he accidentally left on my entry table.
He never told me where he lived. I was pregnant with his child and he kept his address from me like a secret.
That's what the next few months looked like. Him everywhere and nowhere. Coming and going on his schedule. Four hours at the gym, rolling back in at 8 or 9pm when I was exhausted and trying to sleep, waking me up with a shower because it didn't occur to him to be quiet. Leaving his phone open to search results for "why does my girlfriend always lie" — not accidentally. He wanted me to see it. He wanted me to feel accused.
He never came to a single prenatal appointment.
Not one.
When I was around ten weeks pregnant I had the genetic testing done. When the results came in and I found out the sex of the baby, he had me blocked. I found out I was having a daughter alone. At home.
He was checking his blocked messages though. I knew because after the third or fourth time he went MIA, it started to hurt less and I stopped desperately reaching out. Then he'd send messages saying it was my fault, that I didn't love him, that I was the problem. That I gave up too easily.
So I stopped trying. And he'd punish me for that too.
I kept hoping it would change. That the baby would change it. That somewhere in him was still the person who had shown up the night my dad died, who had gone quiet when I said I think I'm pregnant, who had turned red and bashful and said I just called you my girlfriend.
I kept waiting for him to come back.
He didn't.
What I had instead was this — a man who was present enough to make my life harder and absent enough to avoid being responsible for any of it. A man who kept clothes in my apartment and his address from me. Who blocked me constantly.
I was building a nursery alone. Folding tiny clothes that family members had given me at the baby shower. Hanging things on walls. Reading cards people had written to her before she was even born.
I didn't know yet what he would do to it.
Part 8 — The Unraveling, coming next.
If you've ever been pregnant and alone in a room full of someone else's presence — you are not alone.
The loneliness of being with someone who isn't really there is its own kind of grief.