Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
To be fair, Gracen hadn’t needed any in over twenty-something weeks.
“I’ll probably tell him,” Delaney confirmed.
“Yeah?”
“It’d be nice to know that’s what it is,” she added.
Gracen chewed on her lower lip for a half a minute before she said, “If you think you’re having a miscarriage, that sounds Emergency Room worthy to me.”
Delaney rolled her eyes toward her friend. “Stop that—just because it costs nothing to visit the ER doesn’t mean I should because I’m bleeding a little heavy.”
“Are the cramps worse than normal?”
“They’re always bad.”
Bearably so.
Women got used to that.
Gracen pursed her lips, and then checked on Mimi once more. “Let’s get her out of there, we’re eating supper, and take a trip to town.”
“Gracen, I don’t need to go—”
“They’ll tell you. They’ll run a blood test, tell you if the hormone is there, which it is and detectable because the home test said so, and what the levels are, and if they’re too low for a viable pregnancy.”
Her brow furrowed. “How do you know—”
“At seven weeks I was convinced cramping after I hiked for three hours were because I was losing the baby—no blood, or anything, but,” Gracen trailed off, shrugging. “Malachi tried to make me relax, give it the night, you know?”
“You didn’t?”
“Nope. That’s what I pay taxes for, Delaney. I don’t use the ER like a band-aid station, and I’ve been there all of two times in the last three years. I went down on a weekday, before nine when the diagnostics department leaves for the day. A client works in the department, so I might have had some inside knowledge on that bit, though.”
Her friend checked the rose-gold watch on her wrist, and then glanced straight up at Delaney.
“It’s Thursday, and we still have time,” Gracen added.
That achy heart of Delaney’s that she had numbed through the day by going through the motions and refusing to feel jumped to life with a beat that hurt.
“You know I love you, right?” Delaney asked.
Wordlessly, Gracen pushed away from the doorjamb to catch Delaney in a hug around her neck with both arms.
“No matter what—we’re in this together,” Gracen swore against the top of Delaney’s head. “I told you that before, and I meant it.”
No matter what, and regardless of who stuck by her throughout the years, Gracen had made that promise to Delaney when they were just seventeen. To some people, broken promises like those weren’t a big deal. The fact that Gracen never broke her promise said a lot to Delaney about what it meant between the two of them.
“I know,” she mumbled into Gracen’s cardigan sleeves. “Now let me go so I can breathe.”
Sometimes, she hated being short.
Soon enough, though, Gracen released her cage-like hold.
“Come on, let’s get Mimi out from under the dryer,” she said.
Delaney nodded. “Right, yeah. Supper, then the ER. I still feel bad about that.”
Gracen shook her head, as unbothered as ever. “Yeah, don’t. You pay taxes, too.”
A louder than she expected laugh escaped Delaney. “That’s true.”
Her noise had caught the attention of someone else, though.
Raising her voice so the slightly hard-of-hearing woman across the room would hear her name called, Delaney asked, “Mimi, are you ready to take your rollers out?”
Chapter 37
The entrance of the Valleyview Hospital’s emergency department sat atop a hill overlooking the river splitting the town in half, and the mirrored windows along the front allowed patients in the waiting room a view as the clock ticked down time while people waited to be seen by the doctor on call.
Delaney hadn’t been inside the hospital for years—at least three, for sure. As her Jeep rolled to a stop in a parking spot around the back close to the rear entrance doors, her nerves decided to make an appearance in the fast beat of her fingertips rapping against the leather of her purse.
The man behind the wheel of the Jeep didn’t miss Delaney’s nervous tick.
“You good?”
Malachi’s quiet question drew Delaney’s gaze away from the rear entry door where people entered the emergency room.
“Yeah, sure,” she told him.
He arched an eyebrow higher than the other. “Nothing’s … bad, bad, right?”
Delaney wanted to laugh at Malachi’s concern, if only to ease the tension in the vehicle, because it wasn’t really needed. Except this situation wasn’t really a laughing matter, and the cramps in her lower sides had picked up substantially during the ride to town.
So, she lied.
“Everything is fine.”
“Yeah,” he muttered, his head swinging toward the direction of the driver’s door window, “Gracen said that shit, too. Yet, here we are at seven at night, sitting in the parking lot of the hospital, so. What’s that tell you?”
Really, Malachi shouldn’t be sitting there at all, but some circumstances couldn’t be helped. He had been the one to point out that Gracen’s grandmother had woken up once at night since moving into the farmhouse being confused and unsure of where she was and scared because of it. All it took was Gracen to calm Mimi down and get her back into bed, but Malachi didn’t think he would be able to do the same thing should the situation happen again.