“Okay.” The nurse disappeared, and after a minute, someone knocked at the door. “Come on in.”
Eden’s worried face appeared around the corner. Her hair had fallen out of its updo, and mascara dotted her cheeks. The bottom of her dress was wrinkled, as if she’d been crushing it in her palms or winding it around her fingers.
Still
, Maggie thought,
she looks like she just fell from the pages of a magazine. How to Remain Glamorous the Morning After
.
But then Eden burst into tears and darted across the room. “Mags! You’re okay?” She clutched Maggie’s hands in both of hers, weeping. “God, we were both so worried. You have no idea. I couldn’t find you, for the longest time. First we came in the wrong entrance, around the back side or something, and we couldn’t find anyone who knew anything. When we finally did, they wouldn’t tell us anything for the longest time…” She fished for a tissue in her purse.
Maggie glanced toward the door. “Who’s we?”
Eden turned and waved, motioning someone in. A wide-shouldered man took a few steps across the threshold. His brows drew together in worry. Fatigue and pain shot through his features, marring his usual good looks. He leaned against the other empty bed, and his gaze took in the stark walls, the black television, the machines standing like soldiers at attention around the room. Maggie swallowed. She hadn’t expected to see him.
“Andrew. Did the hospital call you?”
Neve’s husband nodded, and his fingers picked at the buttons on his shirt. “I drove up as fast as I could. Met your friend here outside in the parking lot.” He cleared his throat. “Nurse said you’re going to be all right? You can go home in a few hours?”
“I guess so. I sprained both ankles and I’ve got a mild concussion and every other part of me hurts like hell. But otherwise, I’ll be fine.” Maggie pushed herself to an awkward seat in the bed. “How’s Neve? Where is she? The nurse wouldn’t say.”
Andrew shuffled his feet around. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his jeans and avoided her gaze. “She’s got a concussion, I guess. Dislocated shoulder and maybe some torn ligaments in her right leg.” His jaw twitched.
“Oh, God.” Guilt hopped onto Maggie’s shoulder and bit at her with sharp, tiny teeth. “Will she be all right?”
“They think so,” he said, but his voice cracked on the last word. He jammed the heel of one hand against his eyes.
Maggie fell back against the pillow.
If I hadn’t brought her to the ball…if we’d left before the storm got really bad…if I’d been paying attention at that intersection instead of thinking about Jack…
“It’s not your fault,” Andrew continued. “I guess the police are filing charges against the other driver. He blew a point one-two on the breathalyzer.” Still Neve’s husband stood at a crooked angle, swaying as he looked around the room for the tenth time.
“But the accident—there was a lot of trauma to her body, they said, and Neve…” He could barely get the words out. “…she might have lost the baby.”
8:00 a.m.
Dillon stared at Jack as the guy finished talking. The elevator chimed and slowed at the sixth floor and the two men made their way into a brightly lit hallway.
“You’re kidding me. That’s why she came to Boston? To the ball? Why didn’t she just call me?”
I could have written her a check months ago. All she had to do was ask.
Jack shrugged. “She must have had her reasons. You know Mags.”
Dillon did. Exhaling, he took a minute to check the signs in front of them. The nurses’ station, covered with files and charts and a couple of wilting bouquets, sat empty. A custodian walked by, wheeling a towering laundry cart. Static crackled on the intercom above them. Dillon crossed his arms and pursed his lips. “I don’t know if she’ll go for it.”
“I don’t either. That’s why I need your help.” Two hallways led away from them in opposite directions. Jack lifted a hand toward the right. “Six-oh-two. It’s that way.”
“What are you gonna say?” Dillon asked. “Just tell her right out? Or ask her, make her think it’s her choice?”
“I haven’t decided, exactly.”
Dillon chuckled. The guy had an uphill battle ahead of him. He hadn’t seen Maggie in years; still, he couldn’t imagine that she’d agree to this solution without a fight. Feeling magnanimous, he pounded Jack on the back. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said. “If she says yes, I’ll do it for you. For both of you.”
*
Maggie scrunched around in the wheelchair, trying to get comfortable. Thank God for whatever pain relievers the nurse had given her, because they’d turned her full-body ache into a minimal buzz about the hips and ankles. She looked up at Eden. “Guess I’m ready.”
Her friend grasped the handles and rolled Maggie out into the hall. “Okay. She’s just down around the corner, Andrew said.” They swung a hard left. “Room six-sixteen.”
Maggie chewed at what was left of her thumbnail. Nerves roiled in her stomach, and she thought twice about the Jell-O she’d just finished. Cherry-flavoring coated the back of her tongue, and she forced down the gag that wanted to bring it up again. A clock on the wall read a little after eight. According to Andrew, Neve had been awake for almost an hour. The first person she’d asked for, after her husband, was Maggie.
Eden slowed outside the closed door of room six-sixteen. Down here, near the end of the hall, everything moved at a hushed pace. They heard no voices, no doors opening and closing, no announcements over the intercom. To Maggie, the air itself seemed suspended. As if everyone and everything waited for recovery. As if there were no guarantees about who survived whole and unbroken and who didn’t. She closed her eyes and said a prayer. Everything that had mattered to her hours earlier—the insurmountable bills, her house, thoughts of Jack—had fled with Andrew’s broken words about the baby.
It isn’t bad enough that I jeopardized my own life
.
I destroyed another one. One that isn’t even here yet, one that’s just a promise, a kiss inside Neve’s belly, a swelling of love and cells and tiny fingers and toes waiting to be shaped.
“Hang on.” She sat in the wheelchair and stared at the door. She wondered if she could face what waited for her on the other side. In another life, an earlier one, she might have fled. She might have pretended to be too sick to speak to her friend. She might have cried into her pillowcase until the worst of the winds passed. She might have pretended that work needed her, that she couldn’t tear herself away from her deadlines.
Not anymore
.
I‘m not running from things that hurt. I told Jack the truth, after all. I didn’t break apart then, and I won’t now. I can hold Neve’s hand and tell her I’m sorry. I can help her heal. I can face this. I can.
She sat up in the chair. Rubbed her cheeks dry. Smoothed the pilled cotton blanket over her lap. Counted the beats of her heart and told it a little bit of fear was okay.
“I’m ready.”
*
“Wait a minute,” Jack said as he and Dillon started down the hall. He pulled out his cell phone. A nurse had reappeared behind the desk, and she frowned as he answered it. Shaking her head, she pointed at the sign behind him, which read “Cell Phone Use is Prohibited in this Facility.”
Jack nodded, acknowledging her and ignoring her in the same motion. He knew the rules. It didn’t mean he always played by them. “Carl? You get the contracts?”
“They’re all set.”
“Fax them to my home number?”
“Just like you said.”
“Talk to the bank manager?”
“Just got off the phone with him.”
The nurse cleared her throat, and Jack slid behind a cart of supplies someone had left in the hall. “Okay. I should have her signature in the next hour or so.”
For the first time, doubt crept into the VP’s voice. “You’re sure? I mean, I thought she was—”
“I’ll have it,” Jack said.
“You know the board is going to have a field day with this, don’t you?”
“I’ll handle the board.” Jack flipped the phone shut. Meeting Dillon’s gaze, he gave a sharp nod. “All set. Let’s find Mags.” He fought the nerves clamping his stomach together and continued down the hall. The sooner he got out what he needed to say, the better. He wasn’t sure he could do it more than twice in a lifetime, anyway.
*
Maggie forced herself to look straight at Neve, who lay with the covers pulled up to her chin. Her hair fell across her forehead, damp with perspiration, or maybe tears. Andrew perched on a chair beside the bed. His hands held one of Neve’s, and both thumbs moved against her skin in circles of sympathy.
Maggie inched the wheelchair forward. Lightheadedness flooded her for a minute and she closed her eyes as she thought about what she wanted to say.
I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted to be a mother. I know the grief that comes with a loss like that, even if you had the stirring of a baby inside you and I never did. Never will
. She wanted to tell Neve that she knew about the pain. She understood the emptiness of realizing you wouldn’t carry a child to term. She knew what it meant to give up the possibility of creating a life.
She had to be strong. She had to show Neve that it was possible to go on.
Maggie opened her eyes again. This time, her friend was smiling.
“It’s okay,” she said before Maggie could utter a word. “The baby—it’s—we’re—healthy. We’re going to be fine.”
Maggie burst out crying. A whoosh of emotion filled her ribcage, fear and uncertainty replaced by complete joy. “Oh, I—” She began to hiccup. “I th-thought—Andrew said—”
“They didn’t know at first. But the doctor did a couple of tests and the baby’s fine.”
“They’re s-sure?” Maggie mopped her face with a corner of her blanket.
Neve nodded and glanced up at the machine beside her bed. “The doctor said everything looks okay, just bed rest for the next couple of weeks, and when I’m back on my feet, I have to take it easy. But she said all the signs are good, right now.”
“God, I’m so sorry.” Maggie didn’t know what to say or where to begin. “A-about everything.”
Neve stopped smiling, and when she spoke again, she sounded as if she were sitting behind the desk at Doyle Designs, putting a cranky customer in his place. “Stop it. Don’t you dare apologize. It wasn’t your fault. Not the storm, not the accident. Not any of it. Things happen.
Life
happens. So don’t cry, okay?” She squeezed Andrew’s hand. “We’ve done enough of that already.”
Maggie’s breath slowed. The hiccups subsided. Neve sounded so together. So healthy and smart. Like always. For the hundredth time, she marveled at her assistant’s composure, at her maturity beyond the twenty-two years.
I’m not sure I could go through something like that. Hills and valleys of thinking you lost something and then getting it back again. Imagining you’re at the end of it all and then finding you’re only at the beginning. No, thanks.
“The most important thing is that you’re all right,” Andrew said. He lifted Neve’s hand and brushed his lips against it. “We could always try again. For a baby, I mean. Even adopt, if we had to. But if anything had happened to you, if I’d lost you…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to, Maggie thought. Everyone in the room could read it on his face.
If I’d lost you, I would have lost everything.
Neve met his gaze and ran her fingertips over his chin, in a gesture so intimate that Maggie blushed to be sitting only a few feet away.
Tumblers clicked inside her brain, and as she sat there, something began to make sense. A padlock, the one she’d fastened across her heart years ago, creaked open. She took a deep breath and drew in the sterile smell of the room mixed with Eden’s perfume behind her. To feel that way about someone, to have that certainty and devotion in your life—maybe it was enough, after all. Maybe Eden was right. Maybe having children, or not having them, wasn’t the only glue that held two people together.
Neve raised herself on one elbow. “Is he here?” she asked.
“Who?”
But Neve was looking at Eden. “Andrew said he was coming. Said you talked to him after the accident.”
“I did,” Eden answered.
Maggie twisted in the wheelchair. “What are you talking about?”
Eden tucked a piece of hair behind one ear. “How do you think I knew you were here? After you left the ball, I thought you went straight home. Neve said you didn’t want to stay ay my place, so I figured that was that. Couple of hours later, I was saying my goodbyes, when I got this call telling me to come to the hospital as soon as I could.”
Maybe it was the painkillers kicking in, but Maggie couldn’t spin together what her friend was trying to say. “What are you talking about?”
“It was Jack, silly. Who else?”
Jack?
“But I told him…”
I told him I couldn’t have children. I told him he was wasting his time. I told him I knew he was following me just to get my house.
“I told him to go to hell.”
Eden shrugged. “You probably told him a lot of things. Doesn’t matter. He was trying to find you, you know. Showed up right after the accident happened, I guess, and followed the ambulance to the hospital. He called me when he got here.”
Maggie’s mouth went dry. “You’re kidding.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“I said terrible things to him.”
Eden put her hands on slim hips. “Mags, he’s so madly in love with you, I don’t think he cares. He would have carried you here on his back if the medics had let him. He’s never gotten over you. That was obvious about ten seconds after you walked into the ball last night.” She shook her head. “Whatever you said, I’m pretty sure it’s forgiven.”
Maggie bunched the blanket up between her fingers. She didn’t know what to say. What to think. What to feel.
Hills and valleys of thinking you lost something and then getting it back again. Imagining you’re at the end of it all and then finding you’re only at the beginning…
“Maggie.” The voice was Neve’s, quiet and firm. “Give him another chance.”
She looked at Neve, hand in hand with her husband, and at Eden, and then Maggie knew. Okay, she had debt. She had doubts. She had an ailing mother and broken fences with a stepbrother that needed mending. Jack had a fiancée and a million-dollar business that wanted to buy her tiny one. She could never give him children. He came from one of the most prestigious families in the city. She was stubborn. He was more so. Yet still she wanted to be with him, to wake up next to him, to wind herself into him with every atom that vibrated in her aching being. It defied explanation, but she guessed it didn’t matter.
Maybe that’s what makes it real
.
“Where is he now?”
Eden glanced at the door. “Not sure. Want to go find out?”