“Raise it?” Joelle repeated the words as if they terrified her. “No way! I didn’t want the baby. Travis and I used to go out in high school a little, but we just messed around one night when he was visiting a friend and...” Her voice dropped off. “Who gets pregnant when on birth control?”
Kate felt a twisting stab low in her gut but pushed it aside.Me.
The girl didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “When I told Travis that I was pregnant it was to tell him that I was going to get an abortion.” Neither Kate nor Colt gave any reaction—nor would Kate have judged—but Joelle became defensive. “I know it makes me sound horrible, but you don’t understand. I have to get out of this place. I worked two jobs to go to community college, and I’d just found out that I’d been accepted to Ole Miss on a scholarship when I found out about the baby.”
“How old are you?” Colt asked.
“Twenty-one,” Joelle said. “Travis was a senior when I was a sophomore,” she added, explaining the age discrepancy.
“But you decided to keep the baby?” Kate asked.
Joelle shook her head. “Travis convinced me not to put it up for adoption. I put my scholarship on hold for a semester, and he agreed to pay for all my living and medical costs to have the baby. I had some problems a few months ago—high blood pressure—and had to be hospitalized. I called him and left a message but he never got back to me. I knew he had to be dead. But no one would tell me anything.” She looked at Colt as if he’d said something. “I know I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about him being a SEAL and everything, but I called the base in Honolulu and they wouldn’t tell me anything. I was getting desperate. When the money showed up, I thought maybe I was wrong about Travis being dead andall. But I should have known it wasn’t Travis. He was too decent to pay me off. He would have called.”
Kate exchanged a look with Colt. They didn’t need to tell the girl that it indeed had been Travis, and it was his decency in sending the money that had gotten him killed.
“What can you tell us about the money?” Colt asked.
“Nothing. It just showed up in my bank account one day. But the text said if I wanted more, I needed to stop talking to the press.”
“There was a text?” Kate asked.
Joelle nodded.
“Can I look at your phone?”
She nodded again and motioned to the stack of clothes in the bathroom. “It’s in my jeans.”
While Kate went through the phone log, Joelle turned to Colt. “What am I going to do? How am I going to pay for all this? I’ll have to get a job, and I’ll lose my scholarship. We had a deal!”
Kate looked up when she heard the sound on the monitor. The girl was obviously getting agitated again. She would have gone to her, but surprisingly Colt had already done so. He’d taken Kate’s place by her bed—and her hand. Something about that hand made Kate’s insides burn. It was a small gesture, easily given.
To a pregnant woman.
It should have been me.
“You don’t need to worry about anything,” he said. “You and your baby will be fine. Travis had some savings. I’m sure the baby will have some claim to that. I’ll see that you get whatever you need until it can be all worked out.”
“You will?” Joelle asked.
She seemed surprised, but Kate wasn’t. Colt always took care of his guys.
It was his wife he’d neglected.
By the time they left Joelle, she was looking at Colt as if he hung the moon, and Kate had what she needed from the phone. The text had come from the burner that Travis had been using. But it was the resentment that she was struggling not to show.
It wasn’t fair. First Scott’s maybe-baby news, and now this young girl was having a baby she didn’t want, when Kate had wanted her baby more than anything in the world. She would give anything to change places with the twenty-one-year-old.
And Colt! Where had all that compassion been when she needed it? Her ex-husband had just shown this young girl—this stranger—more kindness and understanding than he had his wife. His wife who’d almost died, who’d just lost their baby, and who had loved him with every inch of her being.
Her eyes blurred as the heat rose up in her throat. Where was the justice in that? Where was the justice in any of this?
And what made her think she deserved justice?
Fourteen
Scott heard the back door slam and thought about going after her. But he glanced out the bedroom window and saw the light go on in the barn. A moment later he heard the music through the cracked open window. Blasting angry-chick music wasn’t very subtle.
Natalie was pissed. So was he. Although he wasn’t sure who at more—her or himself.
