If the baby was mine then I had a child coming into a situation that had completely collapsed and I was going to have to figure out how to be a father under circumstances that had nothing of what I had imagined fatherhood looking like.
Neither version of the future felt like something I could stand up under right now.
I pulled out my phone.
Gerald had called three times. I wasn't ready for Gerald. Gerald would want to talk about payment timelines and the practical reality of what I now owed and I wasn't in a place where any of that was going to land without making everything worse.
I scrolled to a different number.
Lena's mother picked up after two rings.
"Brad." She said it the way she always did. Like she already knew something was wrong before I spoke.
"The ruling came down," I s
