Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~15 min read
Chapter 3: The Test
POV: Rory
Rory – THE SCARE
Rory manages two weeks of awkward professional interactions with Henrik that involve careful distance and absolutely zero eye contact and the kind of rigidly formal interview questions that make it very clear to anyone watching that they are absolutely just reporter and player with no personal history whatsoever, and she’s almost convinced herself that she can maintain this careful boundary indefinitely when her period doesn’t show up on schedule and panic sets in with the force of a freight train carrying all her worst nightmares.
She’s three days late—which could be stress, definitely could be stress considering she’s navigating a new job and the constant low-level anxiety of seeing Henrik at every practice and trying to act like she doesn’t remember what he sounds like when he comes—but by day five her very regular, predictably punctual cycle still hasn’t appeared and Rory finds herself standing in the pharmacy aisle at Walgreens at nine PM on a Thursday staring at pregnancy tests with the kind of existential dread usually reserved for people facing actual catastrophes instead of just potential consequences of drunk protected sex that should have been completely safe.
They used condoms.
Multiple condoms.
She’s on birth control.
The statistical probability of pregnancy under those circumstances is minimal, basically negligible, definitely not something she should be panicking about except her body has apparently decided that regular menstrual cycles are optional and now she’s buying three different brands of pregnancy tests because if she’s going to have a breakdown about possibly being pregnant with her one-night stand’s baby, she wants to be absolutely certain before she completely loses her mind.
She takes the tests at work the next day because waiting until she gets home feels impossible when anxiety is crawling up her throat and making it hard to breathe, and she locks herself in the women’s bathroom on the third floor that nobody uses because it’s next to the abandoned archives and smells faintly of mildew, and she pees on three different sticks while having what might technically qualify as a panic attack about the fact that she might be pregnant, might be carrying Henrik’s baby, might have to tell the Swedish hockey player she’s been studiously avoiding that their one-night stand has resulted in the kind of complication that can’t be solved with professional distance and careful interview questions.
The first test says negative—clear as day, one line instead of two, absolutely not pregnant according to the pink stick she’s clutching in shaking hands—and relief floods through her so intensely that she actually has to sit down on the closed toilet seat and put her head between her knees to stop the dizzy sensation of almost-disaster averted.
Not pregnant.
Thank God.
Thank every deity in every religion.
She’s not pregnant, this was just stress delaying her period, everything is fine and she can go back to her carefully maintained professional relationship with Henrik without having to navigate the absolute nightmare of coparenting with a man she barely knows and definitely shouldn’t have slept with in the first place.
She’s throwing away the tests—wrapping them in approximately seventeen layers of toilet paper because the last thing she needs is someone from the Tribune finding pregnancy tests in the bathroom trash and starting office gossip about who might be expecting—when Margot walks in with an expression of concern that immediately makes Rory freeze like a guilty teenager caught sneaking in past curfew.
“Is that a pregnancy test?” Margot asks, staring at the toilet paper bundle in Rory’s hands like it might explode. “Are you—Rory, are you pregnant?”
“No,” Rory says quickly, shoving the wrapped tests into the trash bin with perhaps more force than necessary. “I took a test. Three tests. All negative. I’m not pregnant. Just paranoid and stressed and apparently my body decided to punish me for having one-night stands with hockey players by making me think I might be carrying his baby.”
“Hockey player?” Margot’s eyebrows shoot up into her hairline. “You slept with a hockey player? When? You’ve been working nonstop since you started this job—”
“Three weeks ago,” Rory admits, leaning against the sink and trying to remember how to breathe normally instead of in the shallow gasps that suggest she’s still not entirely recovered from the panic of thinking she might be pregnant. “The night before I started at the Tribune. One-night stand. We agreed to forget it happened. Except then I showed up to cover the Frost and discovered he plays for the team I have to cover professionally and now we’re stuck in this awkward dance of pretending we’re strangers while both remembering exactly what we look like naked.”
“Oh my God,” Margot says, and she’s starting to laugh in a way that suggests she finds this entire situation hilarious instead of catastrophic. “You accidentally slept with one of your assignments? Rory, that’s—that’s almost impressive in terms of bad timing.”
“It’s a nightmare,” Rory corrects. “And I thought it was going to get infinitely worse when I was late and started panicking about pregnancy, but the tests are negative so I can just go back to my regularly scheduled awkwardness without adding surprise baby to the complications.”
Margot picks up the trash bin, peers at the wrapped tests with the intensity of someone conducting a forensic investigation, and then says quietly, “Rory, this one has two lines.”
“What?”
Rory snatches the bin from Margot’s hands and unwraps the tests with fingers that have started shaking again, and sure enough—the third test, the one she looked at last, the one she barely glanced at before deciding all three were negative—has developed a second line while she was panicking, a faint pink shadow next to the control line that definitely wasn’t there five minutes ago.
Positive.
The third test is positive.
“No,” Rory says, even though the evidence is literally right in front of her, even though the faint pink line isn’t imagination or wishful thinking but actual chemical confirmation that she is pregnant, she’s actually pregnant with Henrik’s baby from their one drunken night together that was supposed to be a mistake they both forgot. “No no no no no, this can’t be happening, we used condoms, I’m on birth control, the statistical probability—”
“Is apparently not zero,” Margot finishes gently, taking the tests from Rory’s hands before she can throw them against the wall or flush them down the toilet or do something equally irrational. “Okay. Okay, let’s think about this rationally. You have one negative, two—wait, is this one positive too?”
She holds up the second test, tilting it toward the fluorescent bathroom lighting, and Rory sees it—another faint line, barely visible but definitely there, mocking her relief from thirty seconds ago when she thought she’d escaped this complication.
Two positive tests.
One negative.
Which means she might be pregnant, probably is pregnant, needs to take more tests or see a doctor or do something other than stand in this bathroom having a complete emotional breakdown while Margot watches with a mixture of concern and poorly concealed fascination.
“I have to tell him,” Rory hears herself say, and the words feel like they’re coming from someone else, someone calm and rational instead of the person she actually is who’s currently spiraling into full panic mode. “If I’m pregnant, I have to tell Henrik. That’s—that’s the ethical thing to do, right? Even if it makes everything infinitely more complicated?”
“Henrik,” Margot repeats. “The hockey player has a name and it’s Henrik. Very Scandinavian. Is he hot?”
“Margot, focus,” Rory snaps, but yes, he’s hot, he’s devastatingly attractive in ways that make her job extremely difficult when she’s trying to maintain professional objectivity. “I need to tell him that I might be pregnant. Today. Now. Before I lose my nerve and convince myself that maybe I can just handle this alone without involving him.”
“You’re going to tell him at work?” Margot asks, looking alarmed. “In front of other journalists and players and people with cameras?”
“No,” Rory says, pulling out her phone and staring at the blank screen like it might magically produce Henrik’s contact information that she deliberately didn’t ask for three weeks ago when they agreed to forget their night together ever happened. “I need his number. How do I get his number without it being weird?”
“Press contact list?” Margot suggests. “Every team has media relations that provide player contact info for interviews.”
Right.
Obviously.
Rory accesses the Frost media database on her phone—one of the benefits of being credentialed press is having direct access to player contact information for interview requests—and finds Henrik’s cell number listed under his official team profile next to stats and a professional headshot that makes him look significantly less attractive than he does in person, which seems like false advertising.
She sends a text before she can overthink it:
*This is Rory Castillo. We need to talk. Privately. Today if possible.*
The response comes back in less than a minute:
*Practice ends at 4. Come to my place after? You remember where it is.*
She does remember.
Unfortunately, she remembers everything about that night with perfect clarity despite the alcohol, which is extremely inconvenient when she’s trying to maintain professional distance and definitely not think about the way he looked at her like she was the most interesting person in the world.
*I’ll be there at 4:30,* she texts back, and then she looks at Margot standing in the bathroom holding three pregnancy tests and trying very hard not to laugh at this entire ridiculous situation. “I’m going to his apartment after practice to tell him I might be pregnant. This is fine. Everything is fine.”
“Everything is definitely not fine,” Margot says, but she pulls Rory into a hug that smells like her signature lavender perfume and feels like the kind of friendship that doesn’t judge you for sleeping with hockey players or potentially getting pregnant from one-night stands. “But we’ll figure it out. You’re going to be okay. Even if you are pregnant, even if this is complicated, you’re going to be okay.”
Rory wants to believe her.
Wants to trust that this isn’t going to destroy her career and her carefully constructed emotional walls and every promise she made to herself about staying away from athletes who can hurt her.
But standing in a bathroom holding pregnancy tests that might mean she’s permanently connected to Henrik whether she wants to be or not, believing in okay feels impossible.
She goes through the motions of work for the rest of the day—writes an article about the Frost’s upcoming game against Boston, conducts a phone interview with the team’s goalie about his recovery from a shoulder injury, avoids looking at Henrik during practice even though she can feel him watching her from the ice—and by the time four-thirty arrives and she’s standing outside his apartment building trying to convince herself to actually go inside, she’s rehearsed approximately seventeen different ways to say “I might be pregnant” and none of them sound any less catastrophic than the others.
Henrik answers the door on the first knock like he’s been waiting, and he looks nervous in a way Rory’s never seen him look on the ice or in interviews—hair disheveled like he’s been running his hands through it, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt that makes him look younger and more vulnerable than his usual confident athlete persona.
“Come in,” he says, stepping aside, and Rory walks into the apartment where this entire complication started three weeks ago, and the irony isn’t lost on her.
“I took pregnancy tests today,” she says, because apparently she’s incapable of small talk when she’s this anxious, apparently she just blurts out life-changing information without preamble or tact. “Three of them. One was negative. Two were positive. Which means I might be pregnant. With your baby. From our one-night stand.”
Henrik stares at her for a long moment, his expression cycling through shock and panic and something that might be calculation as he processes this information, and then he says very quietly, “Are you sure it’s mine?”
“It was ONE TIME,” Rory snaps, offended despite knowing it’s a reasonable question, despite understanding that he has no way of knowing whether she’s been sleeping with other people. “And you were the only—yes, asshole, I’m sure!”
“Okay,” Henrik says, holding up his hands in surrender. “Okay, I’m sorry, I had to ask. What do we do?”
The question hangs in the air between them—weighted with implications about choices and futures and whether “we” even exists when they’re barely acquaintances who happen to have slept together once and are now potentially connected by biology.
“I’m taking another test,” Rory says, pulling the bag from Walgreens out of her purse with hands that won’t stop shaking. “Three more tests. Then I’m making a doctor’s appointment to confirm. The home tests could be wrong—false positives happen, stress can affect results, maybe I’m just late and the positive tests were faulty.”
“And if you’re actually pregnant?” Henrik asks carefully.
“Then we figure it out,” Rory says, even though she has no idea what “figuring it out” looks like when you’re pregnant by a man you don’t know, don’t have a relationship with, definitely shouldn’t have slept with in the first place. “I’m not—I’m not asking you for anything. If I am pregnant, we coparent. Separately. Not together romantically. Just two people raising a kid without making this more complicated than it already is.”
Something flickers across Henrik’s face—disappointment maybe, or relief, hard to tell—and then he nods slowly. “Okay. Coparenting. Not together. I can do that.”
“Good,” Rory says, and she means to leave, means to go home and take more tests and schedule a doctor’s appointment and deal with this alone like she deals with everything alone, but Henrik’s hand catches her wrist gently and she freezes at the contact.
“Let me help,” he says quietly. “With the appointment, the waiting, whatever you need. I know we agreed to forget that night, but if you’re pregnant—if we’re having a baby—then I want to be involved. Not just after it’s born, but now. During this.”
“Why?” Rory asks, genuinely confused because this level of support doesn’t match her experience with athletes, with her ex-husband who couldn’t be bothered to show up for important moments even when they were married. “Most guys would run. Would want nothing to do with a potential pregnancy from a one-night stand.”
“I’m not most guys,” Henrik says, and there’s something in his voice that reminds Rory of the night they met, of the way he listened when she talked, of the gentleness underneath the cocky athlete exterior. “And I take responsibility for my actions. We made this situation together. We deal with it together. Even if we’re not together.”
Rory stares at him, at this man she barely knows who’s offering support she didn’t ask for and definitely doesn’t deserve after the way she’s been treating him like a stranger for the past three weeks, and feels something crack in the careful walls she’s built around vulnerability.
“Okay,” she hears herself say. “Okay. You can help. But this doesn’t change anything between us professionally. At work, we’re still just reporter and player.”
“Agreed,” Henrik says, but he’s smiling slightly like he knows that particular boundary just got significantly more complicated. “When’s the doctor’s appointment?”
“I’ll call Monday,” Rory says. “Earliest they can probably see me is next week.”
“I’m driving you,” Henrik says firmly. “And I’m coming in with you. If that’s okay. I want to be there.”
It shouldn’t be okay.
Should definitely maintain distance and handle this alone and not let him into this potential crisis that’s deeply personal and definitely not his responsibility beyond biological contribution.
But Rory finds herself nodding, accepting his offer, letting him help in ways that feel dangerous because they require trusting an athlete with something important, and she swore she’d never make that mistake again.
“Okay,” she says. “You can drive me. Be there. Whatever. But Henrik, I need you to understand—I don’t do relationships with athletes. I learned that lesson the hard way. So whatever this is, whatever we’re doing, it’s just coparenting if I’m pregnant. Nothing more.”
“I understand,” Henrik says, but there’s something in his eyes that suggests he’s not entirely convinced, suggests he sees potential for something more than Rory’s willing to admit.
She leaves before that look can make her hope for things that don’t exist, before she can do something stupid like ask him to hold her while she processes this potential catastrophe, and by the time she makes it home to her apartment where Margot is waiting with wine and sympathy, Rory’s almost convinced herself that she can handle this.
Even if she’s pregnant.
Even if she’s permanently connected to Henrik.
Even if he’s being surprisingly supportive in ways that make it very hard to maintain the emotional distance she needs to survive this.
She’s a professional.
She’s independent.
She doesn’t need anyone.
She just has to keep reminding herself of that every time Henrik looks at her like she matters.
🔥
END CHAPTER 3
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