I’ve been living with my boyfriend Jake (28M) for about two years now. We’ve got a nice apartment, we’re happy, we’re talking about maybe getting married next year. Pretty standard stuff. Jake works from home a lot doing IT consulting, and I work retail management, so I’m gone most days.
Anyway, this afternoon I got home early because we were overstaffed and my boss sent me home. I walk in, and Jake’s not in the living room like usual. I hear the shower running, so I figure I’ll hop in with him, right? Surprise him a little. We do that sometimes.
I’m stripping down in the bathroom while he’s in the shower, and I drop my phone. It slides under the sink cabinet. So I open the cabinet door to grab it, and that’s when I see it.
A pregnancy test. Positive.
I just… froze. Stared at this thing like it was going to explain itself. My brain immediately went to the worst place: Jake’s cheating on me. With a woman. He’s been bringing someone here while I’m at work. Some woman has been in our bathroom, in our apartment, taking a fucking pregnancy test.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My chest got tight and hot, and suddenly I’m thinking about every time he’s been “busy” when I called, every time he didn’t want to meet me for lunch, every evening he seemed distracted.
The shower turned off. I was still standing there holding this test, and I just… I couldn’t play it cool. The second Jake stepped out of the shower, towel around his waist, smiling at me, I held it up.
“What the fuck is this?”
His face went white. Like, genuinely pale. “Babe, I can explain—”
“Explain what?” I cut him off. My voice was shaking. “Explain why there’s a positive pregnancy test in our bathroom? Are you fucking someone? A woman? Is that what’s been going on?”
“No! God, no, it’s not—”
“Then whose is this, Jake? Because it sure as hell isn’t mine!”
He just stood there dripping on the bathmat, looking absolutely panicked. And that panic? It made me feel worse. Like it confirmed everything.
“I need you to calm down,” he said quietly.
“Calm down? You want me to calm down right now?”
“Please. Just—let me get dressed and I’ll explain everything. I promise it’s not what you think.”
I was so angry I was shaking, but I stepped out of the bathroom and let him get dressed. Those three minutes felt like three hours. I kept looking at the test in my hand, turning it over, like it would suddenly make sense.
Jake came out in sweatpants and a t-shirt, looking nervous as hell. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took a deep breath.
“I’ve been running a support group,” he said.
“A what?”
“A support group. For teenagers. Kids who lost their parents. It meets here, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons when you’re at work.”
I just stared at him. “You’re fucking with me.”
“I’m not. I swear to God I’m not.” He pulled out his phone and started showing me pictures—teenagers sitting in our living room, pizza boxes on the coffee table, Jake standing with a group of kids smiling. “It started about six months ago. My therapist suggested I might want to give back, you know? After my mom died. And I found this organization that needed hosts for small group meetings.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me this?”
He looked down at his hands. “Because I was embarrassed. It sounds stupid now, but… I didn’t want you to think I was being weird or, I don’t know, playing savior or something. And then time kept passing and it felt weirder and weirder to bring it up. Like, ‘Hey, by the way, I’ve been hosting grieving teenagers in our apartment for six months.'”
“The pregnancy test, Jake.”
“One of the girls. Seventeen. She asked if she could use our bathroom during the last session. I think she was scared to take it at home. I found it in the trash after everyone left and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just… stuck it under the sink. I was going to throw it out, I just forgot.”
I sat down hard on the bed next to him. My anger was draining out and being replaced by this weird, hollow feeling.
“You’ve been doing this for six months? Every week?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t think to mention it? Not once?”
“I know how it sounds. I know. But I just… I felt vulnerable about it. These kids are going through something I went through, and helping them makes me feel less broken, but also it reminds me how broken I was. Am. Sometimes.” He rubbed his face. “I didn’t know how to talk about it with you.”
We sat there in silence for a minute. Then he showed me more pictures. Told me their names—not all of them, some kids wanted privacy—but enough that I could see this was real. There’s a schedule. A group chat. Snacks he buys every week that I thought were just him stress-eating.
“The girl with the test,” I said. “Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t come back since. I’ve been worried about her.”
And that’s when I felt like a complete asshole. Because here I was, screaming at him about cheating, when he was actually doing something genuinely good. Something that mattered. And he was too embarrassed about his own grief and his own healing to even tell me.
But also… six months? Six months of secret meetings in our home?
He apologized like ten times. Said he should’ve told me from the start, that he knows it was weird to keep it hidden, that he understands why I freaked out. And honestly? I get it. But I’m also kind of pissed that he didn’t trust me enough to share this part of his life.
So now I’m lying here next to him—he fell asleep an hour ago—and I’m still processing everything. Part of me feels like an asshole for jumping to cheating. Part of me feels justified for being upset about the secrecy. Part of me is just… confused.
What would you do? Am I wrong for being upset about this? Should I just be proud of him and move on? Because right now I honestly don’t know how to feel.
