“The senators we were investigating were planning to unleash the virus on the entire world, all in the hopes of swinging the election in their favor. They were going to kill millions of people all for political gain.”
“What?” Clara laughed. “That’s absurd!”
Parker and I stared at each other. My mind went right back to that cell, to the dark room I had been held in. I shivered as if I was back there on the concrete floor, freezing and on the verge of death. Suddenly, I wasn’t so happy I had told them a damn thing.
“Blake and I were taken and held in some prison while they tried to get the journal of notes we stole from the facility. They needed to know that there was no evidence out there for anyone to find.”
“Michael—” Clara gasped, her eyes filling with tears. “But…wouldn’t they have contacted us?”
“It wasn’t exactly legal. We broke out of there?—”
“Youbroke us out of there,” I interrupted, making damn sure his parents knew exactly how much of a hero their son was. “If he hadn’t broken me out of there, I would have been dead.”
“You’re stronger than you think,” Parker smiled at me.
When he stared at me, it was hard to think of my life going on without him in it. Yes, it was hard to move to a new state surrounded by his family, but I had him, and that was really all that mattered.
“What happened with the virus?” Ben asked.
“They injected someone we knew with it, and she nearly died. Someone at Reed Security found the antidote at the medical facility and got it to the doctors in time. But we were all exposed. We should have been dead,” I said, still unable to believe it.
“And…you’re okay now?” Clara asked. “There are no residual effects?”
We hadn’t been affected by it at all, but now that I suspected I was pregnant, I began to wonder if there would be any implications.
“No, none that we know of. We got off damn easy.”
I tore my thoughts from the dark alley they were threatening to go down and focused on the conversation at hand. “And because of Parker’s heroic actions, the president agreed to look at his case again. Not only did he pardon him and give him an honorable discharge, but he also offered him a job.”
“What?” they both gasped.
“I didn’t take it, obviously.”
“Right, because you needed to come back here and save the ranch,” Ben laughed. “Except, you didn’t stick around when you could have actually saved it.”
“Pop, you’ve always been like this. When you don’t like my decisions, you find a way to blame me for everything that went wrong. But the ranch was going to fail. It was a given!”
This couldn’t go on. Something had to give.
“Because you left!”
“Because—”
My eyes flew open and I unleashed. “I think I’m pregnant!”
Silence descended around me.
Parker very slowly turned and looked at me in shock, his eyes dropping as low as he could see over the table.
“You’re…”
Clara reached over to her son and slapped him upside the head. “You didn’t marry this woman before you got her pregnant?”
“I didn’t know I got her pregnant!”
“Well, this is typical,” Ben sighed.
“Why is this typical? I’ve never gotten a woman pregnant before.”
