Two pink lines. Bright, unmistakable, and a complete fucking death sentence. Frankie rubs a thick hand over his face, his knuckles dragging against his stubble. He wants to blink and have it change.

You had been acting strange for weeks, skittish, nauseous, looking at him with this desperate, fragile hope that he completely misread. He thought it was just the stress. The money trouble.

"I was gonna tell you tonight. At dinner," you whispered, your voice trembling. "I didn't mean for you to find out like that. I just... I needed to be sure before I said anything."

Frankie doesn’t look at you yet. He can’t. If he looks at you, the rage was going to swallow the confusion, and he was terrified of what he was going to look like when that happened. Instead, his mind flashed back to a sterile, white-walled room in a military hospital six years ago. A shrapnel wound that tore through his lower abdomen, a doctor shaking his head, and a piece of paper that explicitly stated, in cold, medical terms, that Frankie would never pass on his DNA. He never told you.

"Who is he?" He asked.

"What?"

"Who's this baby's father?"

"Frankie, it's yours-"

"Don't do that. Do not fucking do that to me," Frankie cuts you off, his voice dangerously low, vibrated with a heat that made the small kitchen feel microscopic. He stands up, towering over the counter, the plastic stick sitting between them like an unexploded IED.

When you try to deny it again he yells, "I'm sterile!"

The silence is deafening.

"The mortar fire that put me in the clinic for three weeks? It didn't just scar my stomach. It fried the plumbing. I have zero motility. Zero. I’ve known since before I met you. I get tested every fuckin' year just to see if the docs were wrong, and every year, it’s the same fucking answer."

The air, still smelling of Frankie's black coffee, felt suffocating as silence settled between you.

"I'm going to ask you one more time. And if you lie to me again, I am walking out that door and I am never looking back. Who the fuck were you with?!"