I still felt her intense grip on my arm. I felt the heavy weight of my promise.
Mia reached over and covered my hand reassuringly with hers. “I know you feel responsible, but the nursery will get social work involved and sort this all out.” She pulled the bacon out of the oven and began slicing it in half while Sam drained the scallops and patted them dry with a paper towel.
I had a lump in my throat, so I just nodded. It was still so sharp in my mind, so heavy on my heart, how I’d held that tiny little bundle, looked down into those blinking dark blue eyes. All that potential, all that promise—what would happen to this innocent little baby who had no one to defend her?
“Otherwise, how was your night with Adam?” Mia asked. “He and Brax are old friends, did you know that? They went to med school in Philly together.”
I jerked up my head, startled out of my thoughts by thinking of an entirely different night—definitely not the one she was asking about. I preferred the warm, moonlit, tropical one, because last night had been disastrous all around.
“Fine,” I said. “I—if he’d chill a little, I’d like him better.” I liked him awholelot better when I thought he was normal. But maybe it was a good thing he was currently on my bad list. I thought of how difficult my life would become if he ever switched to mygoodone.
“You heard his story, right?” Mia asked.
“I know his wife died. But I don’t know many details.” I knew that he was heartbroken. That he was struggling to start his life again. But that still didn’t excuse him for being such a grump, in my opinion.
Mia wrapped a scallop carefully with bacon and pinned it with a toothpick. I followed her lead and tried to do it like she had. But I was more focused on what she was about to say. “Adam’s wife had a rare type of leukemia, and her stem cell transplant failed. So sad.”
“Oh. Awful.” Those few days in Turks, we hadn’t discussed many details. “He’s really driven about making the ER efficient. About people sticking to doing their job. It’s like he’s on a mission to stomp out all fun.”
“That’s not surprising,” Mia said. “Brax said that he was devastated when she died. It really changed him.”
My hands fumbled and the scallop tumbled out of the bacon and fell onto the floor. “It’s kind of sad. When he isn’t so on guard, he can be fun.”
Mia frowned as she looked up from rolling. “How do you know that?
For a second, I froze. I generally told my friends almost everything, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell them about what had happened before they’d arrived to be wonderful friends to me in Turks and Caicos. Maybe because sleeping with Adam had been so out of character for me. Maybe because I feared no one would believe me that I’d forged such an intense connection with someone I barely knew. Maybe I couldn’t even explain it to myself.
I hadn’t expected anything more from Adam. And I definitely hadn’t expected to see him again in my hometown. So then why had his dismissal hurt so much?
Maybe I should come clean. I knew my friends wouldn’t judge me—too much. I took a big breath. “Okay, you’re not going to believe this, but?—"
Mia turned from looking out the kitchen window. “Ani, did the dog ever come in?”
“Oh no. I forgot!” I jumped up, sprang to the window, and threw open the sash. Just kidding. I don’t even know what a sash is.
Sure enough, no Arnold. Split. Vamos. Vanished.
Great.Another guy who couldn’t be trusted.
Also, obsessing about Adam had lost me the dog. Nice.
I grabbed my windbreaker and ran into the drizzle, yelling “Arnold Palmer”at the top of my lungs.
Chapter Seven
Adam
“So what’s happening with that baby everyone’s talking about?” my friend Brax asked. Our pickups were parked side-by-side in my driveway, mine red, his black, and we were loading all the firewood we’d just cut up from a fallen tree in my yard.
Surrounded by woods but also sort of overtaken by them—that was my yard. And on this drizzly spring morning, it was a wild, untamed mess. I’d like to say that it had the potential for beauty to emerge—but I wasn’t really feeling it.
I’d bought this dull gray ranch sight-unseen from Chicago because the realtor liked the price, because it was walking distance from my mom’s, and because it didn’t need any immediate work, other than the yard. And Ilovedyard work. The rest I didn’t care much about. So yes, I bought a house based on the ability for me to whack an endless supply of weeds, dig up saplings growing where they shouldn’t be, and chop down half-dead trees.
I felt sort of miserable. I’d handled things with Ani totally wrong—again. And I didn’t think I could confide in anyone aboutthis, even a good friend like Brax. The one-night stand, the way she’d suddenly shown up right in my ER—or the way I’d suddenly shown up in her hometown, if you want to look at it that way, and most of all, the bad way I’d handled everything.
“I don’t have any updates yet,” I said. “I only know that the mom took off in the middle of the night. And there’s no precedent to go after her because she used Safe Haven. I mean, she’s safe from prosecution but also not getting any kind of help or services.”
“Safe Haven is when someone surrenders their baby, right?”
