Page 65 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I sit down at the kitchen table instead. My legs ask for it and I let them have it.

The shaking's slowed some. Not gone. Slowed enough that a thought can get a word in edgewise between all the panic.

And that's when it finds me. Quiet. Underneath everything else, where I can't see it coming in time to stop it.

I want this baby.

I go still.

Not someday. Not under different circumstances, better timing, a man who isn't carrying two years of grief around like a second skin. Now. This one. This exact impossible situation.

I press a hand flat against my stomach and it hits me for the second time today, except this time it doesn't feel like terror. It feels like something turning over slow and warm underneath the fear, and it doesn't care about thirteen weeks and never renew and one box always packed. All of it, gone quiet for one long second, because some part of me I didn't even know was still in there is already halfway to loving somebody the size of a lentil.

What is wrong with me. What is WRONG with me, wanting this.

I don't have an answer. I sit with my hand on my stomach at my own kitchen table and let both things be true at once, the terror and the want, because apparently that's what this is now.

Tell him. Don't tell him. Tell him tonight. Tell him never. He's finally starting to steady out, finally not falling apart in front of me, and I hand him this and what does it do? Does it wreck him or does it save him? I don't know. I don't know and I can't afford to guess wrong.

I think about the fire. Not the one in his eyes when he looked at me across that table at the tavern. The real one, the one he told me about with his voice gone flat and far away, his own address coming over that radio. A wife he couldn't get to in time. I am asking a man who lost everything to a fire he couldn't get to fast enough to somehow be ready for this, and I don't have the first idea if he can be.

Maybe I don't tell him yet. Maybe I need one more day to figure out how to say it without breaking him.

One more day. That's all I want. One quiet day to get my feet under me before the whole world tips sideways again.

I take one more breath and go to grab the folder off the counter.

***

The knock comes before I make it three steps.

Three raps, a pause, two more. Debbie Sue's knock. Nobody in Willowbend has a knock like Debbie Sue's.

"One second," I call, and my voice comes out fine. Steady. Nurse voice, right on cue.

I open the door.

She's already talking before it's all the way open, wine bottle in one hand, phone in the other, mid-sentence like she started this conversation somewhere down my driveway.

"—okay so first, Owen looks like somebody kicked his dog and left it out in the rain, and it's your fault, and I love it, and second—"

She breezes past me into the kitchen the way she always does, setting the wine bottle down on the counter without looking.

Her hand freezes an inch above it.

She stops talking mid-word.

I follow her eyes and there it is, right where I left it, right where her wine bottle almost landed on top of it. COUNTY MEDICAL LABORATORY in letters big enough to read from the doorway, big enough she didn't have to try.

I forgot it. I had one job, hide the folder, and I forgot the one folder.

Debbie's eyes come back to my face. Slow. Careful. The way you look at somebody when part of you already knows and the rest of you is praying you're wrong.

Neither of us says anything for a beat that lasts way too long.

Then Debbie Sue Monroe, wine bottle still in her hand, forgotten, whispers the only four words either of us has got left.

"Nellie Ann Greer."