And suddenly…it was actually possible.
FOURTEEN
Forrest
The next two weeks passed in a complete blur.
My life had been stagnant for a very, very long time…and now, all of a sudden, everything was moving. Willa had arrived; we were working on getting her identification and safety from the Daleys with a lawyer; Stetson and Marlena were looking into Shepherd Daley’s criminal connections.
And now I was sitting in the lobby of a doctor’s office in San Antonio, waiting to see if Willa was healthy…and if she was pregnant.
In hindsight, it felt like sheer stupidity on my part. When she’d walked into my bedroom that night and told me she couldn’t get pregnant, I’d believed her on instinct; I’d been making it a practice to trust her, given how many people had lied to her, how she hadn’t been heard for so long. So I’d come inside her.
Then I’d done it again.
And again.
And…again.
And it hadn’t occurred to me until we actually started playing at the prospect of it that it might actually be possible.
Shepherd Daley was a decrepit old asshole, and he’d only ever had five kids with four wives over the course of his entire adult life. The youngest of his kids was, according to Willa, fourteen.
Fourteen years without a child, even when he’d…I couldn’t even think of it. All the years she’d spent taking the blame for something wrong with him?—
It made me sick.
And I wanted…
Fuck me. Sophie and I had always talked about kids, but it seemed so far away when we were still engaged, working through school, starting our business. It was a concept, not a reality.
Sitting in this doctor’s office, though?
This was real.
The lobby door opened and Willa came through. She crossed to me, her brow furrowed, fingers twisting together in front of her, and we walked out together without saying anything, through the lobby and through the sliding doors and out into the San Antonio heat. I waited until we were on the sidewalk away from the entrance before I looked at her.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. They ran…they ran some tests for STI’s? I’m all good on that front. And the doctor talked to me about what Daley did.” Her eyelashes fluttered. She still wasn’t looking at me. “They did bloodwork and a urine test too.”
I waited. Held my breath. My lungs were burning.
She looked over at me.
“That last one was positive.”
“What—”
“Faint positive,” she said. “For pregnancy. They can’t be sure?—”
I reached out and gripped her hand. She went still.
And I was just…
I hadn’t expected it, hadn’t truly thought it was possible. I knew it was a longshot, figured we just needed to be safe.
But here she was.
