Page 63 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I sit in my truck with my apology dying behind my teeth, and every instinct I own — every one that's kept me alive walking into buildings other men run out of — is saying the same word on a loop.

Wrong. Something's wrong. And it's got Nellie's name on it.

My hand's on the gearshift before I've decided a thing.

Chapter eighteen

One Hundred and Eighty-Seven

NELLIE

Rewind: twelve hours.

I am four days late.

I've checked it against the cycle app. Checked it against the paper calendar on the fridge, the one with June's birthday circled in red. Checked it a third time standing in the kitchen doing nothing, staring at the wall like the wall's going to argue with me.

It doesn't argue. Four days is four days.

I have never once in my adult life been four days late. Not during finals week. Not the year Mama moved us twice in one August and I forgot to eat for three days straight. My body runs on rails. It's the one thing about me that's never once let me down.

There's one night that could do this.

One laughing, careless, neither of us was thinking straight night, two and a half weeks back, tangled up in my own sheets with his mouth on my throat and his hands everywhere and neither one of us stopping to be smart about it. I remember every second. I remember not caring.

I care now. God, do I care now.

My hands won't sit still. I catch myself pacing the kitchen, coffee mug in one hand, going nowhere, and I make myself stop.

Okay. Think like a nurse, not like a woman about to come apart in her own kitchen.

Two weeks is too early to trust a drugstore stick. I've watched enough scared eighteen-year-olds cry over a false negative because they tested too soon and believed it with their whole heart. I need the real answer, not a maybe.

There's a blood test that doesn't lie this early. Quantitative. And I know exactly where to get one drawn without half of Willowbend General learning my name by lunch.

***

Kerrville has a direct-access lab two exits off the highway, wedged between a tire shop and a Baptist church, the kind of place that draws blood for cash and doesn't ask why. No doctor's order required. I know because I've sent patients there myself.

Forty minutes each way. Ball cap pulled low. Sunglasses I don't need because it's overcast. Cash instead of my insurance card, because insurance leaves a paper trail and apparently, I am now the kind of woman who thinks about paper trails.

The tech ties off my arm like it's nothing. To her, it is nothing.

To me, the needle going in is the loudest thing that's ever happened to my body.

"Results usually post same day." She tapes the cotton ball down, not even looking at me. "Hour, hour and a half."

I sit in my truck in that parking lot, engine off, radio off, both hands wrapped around a coffee I never drink. I don't watch the clock. Watching the clock makes it worse.

My brain won't land anywhere and stay. It jumps. Owen's face at the auction, that spotlight swinging over. The porch, the ring on the chain, his shoulders shaking in the gray light.

Please be negative. Please please please be negative.

I don't even know which answer I'm praying for anymore.

***

The notification comes through while I'm still in the parking lot. Results available.