Page 132 of Just Watch Me
When Zane stepped out of the lift, Skylar was walking the corridor with her hand on an IV pole and the nurse beside her. She was dressed in two hospital gowns, one worn front to back and the other back to front, their edges flapping about in disorganized fashion. A pair of gray slipper socks completed the look. He said, “Ah, the glamour of hospital.”
“To add to my allure,” she said, “I’m walking to get the gas moving. Charming.” She smiled, white, drained face and all, and he grinned and said, “Nah, no worries. I told you, it’s all men in my life, and for some reason, they all fart too much. When they do it in the scrum, now … that’s a special kind of awful. There should be a rule. No baked beans on toast for rugby forwards.”
He kept up that kind of chat back to her room, and when they were alone again and she was taking cautious sips of herdrink, said, “I rang the room, but didn’t get the kids. Rang the front desk and got the nanny’s number, and finally talked to Scarlett. They’re at the pool, and glad to hear you’re OK. I had to talk to Finlay personally, because he needed to hear it from me.”
“He worries.”
“Yeh.” There was his hand, wrapped around hers again. “Scarlett told me that she and Finlay’d made a pact. She’d look after my kids, he’d look after yours, and they’d decide together what to do. Co-captains, she called it. Seemed quite proud of herself, and Finlay did too.”
“Kids like to be responsible,” she said. “As long as it’s something they can handle. It’s good for them. They did well in the earthquake, too.”
She shifted in bed, and he asked, “Pain?”
“No. Not bad. Oh—I should tell you that I got travel insurance before we came. Thank God, because this is a private hospital, and heaven knows how much all of this will have cost. I’ll have to pay the bill myself, but then I get reimbursed.”
“It makes me less of a hero,” he said, “but I reckon I can stand that. I’ll tell you what. I’ll pay, and you can reimburse me later.”
“You may have a complex,” she said.
“Same one you do. That we’re used to handling things ourselves.”
She sighed. “Too deep for me today. I’ll have to think about it later. We fly out tomorrow morning, though. We need to pack and all. When are they letting me out of here?”
“Tomorrow sometime. Stop worrying. I already rang up and asked for bereavement leave.”
“For—” She blinked her green eyes at him. “What?”
“For the miscarriage. We’ll fly home on Wednesday instead. The doctor says you’ll be good to do it by then, if you don’t have to walk too far or carry any bags. Wheelchair,I reckon, at the airports, and I’m pretty good at carrying bags.”
She looked down and plucked at the white sheet. “What?” he asked.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “That I was pregnant. I don’t want you to think—I can’t bear you to think that I—” Her hand was shaking. “And I don’t?—”
“Bloody hell,” he said. “I need to hold you.”
She looked up at him at last. Pink around the eyes and nose, because a ginger couldn’t hide a thing. “Can you? Please? Because I feel?—”
It took some maneuvering, but he managed to get onto the narrow bed and to get his arm around her, and that was so much better. He wanted just to lie here like this, but she needed to talk, so he said, “This isn’t an accusation. It’s a question. How didn’t you know? It must have been from that first time. Which was … what? A couple of months ago?”
“It was the implant. For birth control. Not how I got pregnant, but why I didn’t know. They tell you that you might bleed more than usual, or that you may not bleed at all, or just spot. It mucks up your hormones, too, so when I was a bit emotional, a bit tired, and a bit spotty, I just thought it was that. And I don’t know what to feel now. I know it should be relief. Itisrelief. But …”
“But it was a pregnancy,” he said. “And now it isn’t. And I’m not sure whether I should tell you this next bit, but I think maybe you should hear it.”
“Please,” she said. “Anything you have to say, tell me. We have to be honest here. It feels too bad otherwise. It feels too bad anyway, but I need to know what you feel. What you think.”
“The doctor told me this morning that pregnant women shouldn’t travel to Fiji, especially in the first trimester.”
“What? Why not?”
“Zika.”
“Mosquitoes. Birth defects. Oh, my God.” Her hand was on her belly as if there were still something there. “But I haven’t been ill.”
“People often aren’t, but they can have the illness all the same. I don’t want to say it was for the best, but maybe it was.”
“My God,” she said again. “But you see, this is the problem! Why do I feel so bad, when itwasfor the best, and I know it? How could I have had another baby? How could I have managed?”
“Well, to be fair,” he said, “it would’ve been mine too. Easier to manage with two of us, eh.”
