Page 66 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Beat.

"No."

Chapter nineteen

Triage

NELLIE

Debbie Sue Monroe has never whispered in her life.

She's whispering now.

"Nellie Ann Greer." The wine bottle goes down on my counter, slow, like she's setting out evidence. "No."

"Debbie—"

"How far?"

"Four days late. Four and a half weeks, the way the doctors count it." Nurse-brain, offering math nobody asked for. "The hCG was 187. That's, um. That's not a maybe."

She looks at the folder. Looks at me. Looks at the folder again like it might change its mind.

Then she crosses my kitchen in two steps and hugs me like a car wreck.

That's when I cry. Standing in my own kitchen with a lab folder between us and Debbie Sue's chin hooked over my shoulder, I cry the way I haven't cried since I was nine years old and we left Tulsa in the middle of the night.

She doesn't say congratulations. She doesn't say oh no. She rubs circles on my back and says, "Okay. Okay, honey. Okay," until my breathing evens out.

She lets me go and digs her phone out of her back pocket. Dead black screen. "I was texting Owen when I saw that folder. Asking if he was with you." She sets it face-down on the counter like it bit her. "I killed it mid-sentence."

Then she holds me by both shoulders, and ruins it.

"When are you telling Owen?"

***

Five days later I'm flat on a table in Kerrville with a paper sheet across my lap and Debbie Sue holding my hand like we're the couple.

"You didn't have to come," I tell her for the fourth time.

"You drove forty minutes for a blood draw in a ball cap and sunglasses like you were selling secrets to the Russians. You're not doing this part alone too."

The tech is young and kind and calls me sweetheart. The screen is turned away from me while she works, and I know exactly what she's doing, I've stood on her side of this wand a hundred times, and none of that stops my hands from sweating.

"There we go," she says, and turns the screen.

A little black circle in all that gray static. And inside it, a smaller white ring, perfect and round, like somebody dropped a wedding band into a snowstorm.

"Gestational sac, right where it should be. And that little ring is the yolk sac." She smiles at me. "Too early for a heartbeat yet, hon. Two more weeks and this room won't be able to shut it up."

Two more weeks.

I have told a hundred women that exact thing in that exact voice. Too early, come back, it's all normal. I have handed out that sentence like a mint. I never knew it could land on a person like a freight train.

I am crying before she finishes measuring.

Because I know what that black circle is. It's a room. My body built a room, first thing, before anything else, before there's even a somebody to put in it. Built the walls and hung the door and started waiting.