Page 7 of The Best Friend Problem
Both women immediately looked up from their tasks. Crap, had her tone sounded too doom and gloom? This was meant to be happy news, but the thought of leaving her friends struck a melancholy chord.
“Oh my God, you’re dying!”
Mo, ever the dramatic one.
Pru rolled her eyes. “No, I’m not dying. This is good news. Or it will be, but it will change some things.”
Mo hurried to the table, coffee in hand, and sat next to Lilly, who watched Pru with focused interest. Pru took the seat by Mo, facing Lilly, and glanced back and forth between her friends. Nerves fluttered in her stomach like a swarm of angry bees. Better to just put it out there, like ripping off a bandage. Let it go and hope for the best.
“I’m going to have a baby.”
Two jaws flopped open, green and brown eyes going wide as her friends stared at her.
“You’re pregnant!” Mo’s excited scream nearly burst her eardrum.
“You shouldn’t be drinking coffee in your condition.”
Lilly reached for her mug, but Pru pulled it back. No one deprived her of caffeine.
Besides, she’d gotten assurance from her OB-GYN that a cup a day was perfectly safe during pregnancy.
“I’m not pregnant. Yet.”
Mo scrunched her nose, the tiny freckles crossing the bridge folding together. “What do you mean, yet?”
“I’ve decided to go it alone and use a donor. IUI.” At her friends’ confused looks, she explained, “Intrauterine Insemination. And if that fails, I’ll move on to In Vitro Fertilization.”
At their continued silence and baffled looks, Pru pressed on.
“You both know I’ve always wanted to be a mom. And while I’m sure there are a lot of nice men out there, I’m just not sure there’s one out there for me—”
“Don’t say that, Pru.” Mo held a hand to her heart, a stricken expression scrunching her brow. “Everyone has a soul mate. You’ll find yours; you just need to keep looking.”
She’d been looking. For years. At one point she’d thought she found him, but then he’d found something else. Something more important than her. Terrence hadn’t even informed her he was looking for work out of state. What did that say about their relationship?
She’d misjudged him, misjudged their relationship. And yeah, maybe she’d been a little reluctant to trust since then. A little wary of what guys said versus what they actually did. Could anyone blame her?
She was tired of looking. Tired of relying on someone else to fulfill her dream. Though women were having babies later and later in life, she knew the older she got, the harder it would be. For her, especially, according to her doctor and the results of her fertility test. Maybe she would meet her one and only someday—she wasn’t going to hold her breath—but she didn’t want to hold out for that slim hope and miss her chance of becoming a mom.
A piece of her was missing. She had an emptiness inside, a part of her identity not yet realized. One that could only come to light when she held her soft, sweet child in her arms, raised them with all the love she had in her soul, kissed their boo-boos and wiped their tears away.
She wanted a baby more than she wanted a man.
“I’m not hanging my dreams on a possibility,” she answered honestly, a heavy weight in her chest at the thought of all the years of hoping to find her prince charming only to face frog after frog.
“There’re plenty of fish in the sea.”
Raising her mug, she skewered Mo with what Finn called her bullshit glare. “There’s also a lot of garbage.”
Lilly snorted into her coffee mug. “Amen to that.”
“I promise this won’t affect the business,” she told them. “Obviously, I will have to take a little time off when the baby is born, but I can still manage my full workload and be a mom.”
“Well, of course you can.” Lilly set her mug down with a sharp smack. “Women can be CEOs and single mothers. We’ve been raising babies on our own since the dawn of time. I have every confidence in your ability to manage a work-life balance.”
“Yeah.” Mo scooted her chair around, slinging her arm over Pru’s shoulders. “There was a reason we called you ‘mother hen’ in college. You already take care of us all the time. Fixing us soup when we’re sick, watching sappy rom-coms with me after a breakup even though I know they’re not your fave. You’re going to be the best mommy ever! Who needs a man?”
“Aren’t you Team True Love?”
