Page 64 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I've told a hundred patients not to read their labs alone in the car. I open it in the truck.

Mama's voice shows up uninvited, the way it always does when I'm scared. You're smarter than me, Nellie-girl. You won't end up stuck.

Shut up, Mama. Not now.

I open it.

Quantitative hCG, Serum: 187 mIU/mL. Reference range (non-pregnant): <5. Result: POSITIVE.

I read it twice. Then a third time, like the number's going to soften up if I stare at it long enough. It doesn't. One hundred and eighty-seven isn't a maybe. It isn't a borderline value some tech asks you to repeat in forty-eight hours to be safe. It's a door slamming shut on every plan I never let myself make, and a whole new one flying open behind it before I'm ready for either.

My chest goes tight. Not the good kind of tight.

Pregnant. I'm pregnant. Owen's baby. Oh God.

I press a hand flat against my stomach without deciding to. It's instinct, the same gesture I've watched a hundred terrified women make from the other side of an exam table. I never understood it until right now, sitting in a gravel lot outside a lab in a town that isn't mine, alone.

Oh shit.

Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

No. No no no no no. I know better. I know BETTER. I'm a goddamn nurse, A hundred and eighty-seven.

I have taught contraception classes. I have stood in exam rooms and walked teenagers through exactly how this happens and exactly how you keep it from happening, and I know the failure rates cold, and none of those rates cover reached for the nightstand and let him hold my hand instead.

Thirty years old. I know better than any woman in this county how not to let this happen.

So what the hell is wrong with me.

My hands are shaking. When did my hands start shaking.

He can't know.

He can't know he can't know he cannot know. I watched him fall off a roof for me. I watched him shaking on that porch at dawn with a dead woman's ring in his fist, two years of grief still working its way out of him one nightmare at a time. He is barely standing.

And I'm supposed to hand him this? He'll go quiet again. Worse than the porch. He'll go so far inside himself I'll never get him back, and I will be the one who did that to him.

"Okay," I say out loud. To nobody. To the empty truck cab, to the steering wheel, to my own two hands that won't stop shaking. My voice comes out wrong, too high, not mine. "Okay. Okay. It's okay."

It is not okay. Nothing about this is okay. I say it anyway, again, again, because it's the only sound my mouth knows how to make right now and somebody has to say something or I'm going to come apart right here in this parking lot.

I ask the front desk for a printed copy before I leave the building. I couldn't tell you why. Maybe because a number on a phone screen still feels like something that could be a mix-up, and a piece of paper with a hospital letterhead on it does not.

They hand it to me in a plain white folder. COUNTY MEDICAL LABORATORY, blue block letters across the front, big enough to read from across a room.

***

I drive home with the folder on the passenger seat like it's a person riding shotgun.

I take it slow. Slower than I've ever driven that stretch of highway, both hands locked on the wheel at ten and two, because they won't hold still and I don't trust myself at fifty-five right now. A truck rides my bumper for a mile before it swings around, horn blaring, and I don't even flinch. I just keep breathing, in for four, hold for four, out for four, the way I tell my patients to when they're spiraling, and somewhere around mile marker nine it almost works.

Back at the cottage, I walk in, set it on the kitchen counter without thinking, and go straight for the bathroom because I need cold water on my face before my legs give out. I mean to come right back for it. I mean to hide it somewhere smart. My brain isn't handing out smart right now.

I splash water on my face. Blot it dry. Check the mirror.

I look exactly the same. That feels wrong. I look exactly the same and everything about my life came apart and put itself back together as something else entirely.

Get it together, Nellie. Nurse voice. Steady hands. You've told people worse news than this and kept your face still. You can keep your own face still.