Will I always feel this torturous ache of concern when it comes to Max Holden?
I rest my palm on his cheek. “Max? Are you hearing me?”
He blinks, leaning into my touch. “Yeah. I’m hearing you.”
“Are you okay?”
“Fuck no.” He looks dazed and doleful, so very out of it. He’s definitely still drunk—I see it in the sleepiness of his eyes, the sluggishness of his movements—but he’s no longer cross. Now he’s just sad.
“Things will get better,” I say, hoping it’s the truth.
He shakes his head. “Dick move back there, right? Verbally assaulting the girl who’s saving my ass? You’re right to hate me. You should’ve left me on the side of the road, Jilly.”
Jilly. God. He knows exactly how to play me. I pull my hand away. What was I thinking, touching him? Too impulsive, too intimate, totally inappropriate.
“I would never leave you on the side of the road. You know I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah … I’m sorry I keep screwing up.” To his credit, he sounds sincere.
“What happened? Why the whisky?”
He grimaces. “The last few days … shitty.”
“You’re going to have to pull it together, Max. Like, soon.”
“Yeah. Probably hard to believe right now, but I’m working on it.”
“Well, work harder. Because I can’t keep reliving this same experience. You mess up and somehow I get involved, and we both end up suffering.”
“I get it,” he says. “It’s hard on me, too.”
“Then fix it.”
He gazes at me for a long, pensive moment. Finally, quietly, he says, “Thanks for coming to get me.”
He climbs out of the car and makes a slow, stutter-step trek to his front door. When he’s safely inside, I back down the Holdens’ driveway and into my own, blinking back tears.
20
WHEN I WALK IN THE FRONT DOOR, Meredith’s in the living room, and for a half second, I assume she’s been exercising—she’s perspiring and she’s flushed, grimacing under the strain of whatever she’s put her body through. Then I notice that she’s holding her phone and, oh my God, her trusty contraction timer is open on its screen.
With a rush of terror, I comprehend what’s actually going on, and my bag slips off my shoulder. It lands with a thump as I stand, gaping.
Meredith’s head snaps up. She grits her teeth—she’s biting back a curse or a groan or a scream—and pinches her eyes closed so tight she’s nearly unrecognizable. For a long minute, she breathes shallowly, in and out, in and out. Then she opens her eyes.
I haven’t moved a step.
She grunts, “Baby.”
Meredith is a woman of beauty and poise and control. This sweating, snarling beast before me … she’s petrifying.
“Jill,” she says, jerking me back to reality. “Baby.”
My stomach flip-flops with a bizarre combination of bewilderment and trepidation and … excitement? I hurl into action, dashing across the living room. “Why are you just sitting here?!” And then I realize: I’ve had her car all afternoon. “Meredith! Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was planning to, but I was trying to reach your dad first.”
“We have to go to the hospital,” I say, trying frantically to catalog what we need to take with us.
“I can’t”—she pauses to take in a great gulp of air, one that seems to bring her back to herself—“go anywhere without your dad.”
“Where is he?”
She dabs her forehead with a dampened washcloth. “I’ve been trying to call him for the last hour. No one’s at the office, and he’s not picking up his cell.”
“But he knows the baby’s coming?”
She shakes her head, nearly hysterical. “I haven’t spoken to him since this morning.”
“We have to get you to the hospital, Meredith. You can’t give birth on the couch just because Dad’s disappeared!”
Tiny fissures run like rivers through my heart when she says, “But I need him.”
“What about Marcy?” And then I remember—
“Seattle,” Meredith moans.
“I’ll call Mrs. Tate.” A hospice nurse is better than no nurse.
Meredith nods, but her face is contorting again, and she’s found my hand. She squeezes. My fingers are turning blue, and I’m paralyzed with fear—of Meredith and her new herculean strength, and of the leech baby, who might be trying to claw its way out of her.
I find Mrs. Tate’s cell number in Meredith’s list of contacts, but get her voice mail. The Tates’ landline, too, goes unanswered. Panic fills my throat, fizzing up like champagne in a flute.
Meredith struggles through another fit while I try Dad’s cell, then his office. He doesn’t pick up the phone and neither does Natalie, who’s paid to sit at a freaking desk and do just that.
I toss my own cell onto the coffee table and try not to cry out as Meredith grips my hand again. I find myself breathing along with her, quick, shallow puffs that make my head feel like it’s floating away. When it’s over and she lets me go and my fingers regain feeling, I say, “Meredith, we have to go to the hospital. I’ll come in with you—I’ll stay with you the whole time, if you want.”
Because fear, apparently, breeds impulsivity.
She’s shaking her head. “I can’t ask that of you.”
“You’re not asking—I’m offering. The least I can do is get you there, and then I’ll help however I can until Dad shows up.”
Her expression is insultingly cynical. “Jillian, you don’t know anything about childbirth.”
“Doesn’t matter. You can’t have the baby here.”
I watch it happen: my words permeating her pain-addled mind, her slow acceptance, her swelling hope. “You’ll coach me until your dad arrives?”
I falter at the word coach, picturing myself in a baseball cap, holding a clipboard and pumping my fist as Meredith ooh-ooh-aahs her way through labor.
What have I gotten myself into?
“Of course, Mer.” Dad’s left me with no other choice.
I grasp her elbow and attempt to pull her up off the couch. My effort combined with her lack of assistance reminds me of a tugboat hauling a barge through a choppy harbor.
Once she’s standing, leaning up against the wall of the foyer while I collect my wallet and keys, she says, “Oh! The bags! Run to my bedroom and get them, will you, Jill?”
I dash to the back of the house, into Dad and Meredith’s bedroom. The bags sit on the checkered chaise next to the window. The large duffel’s been packed for weeks, full of brand-new nightgowns and slippers, mini shampoos and a travel hair dryer. The second bag’s much smaller, stuffed with diapers, flannel blankets, and what Meredith calls a “coming home outfit,” a frothy white ensemble with layers of lace and tulle—in other words, totally practical. I grab them both and hightail it down the hallway. I help Meredith out the front door and into the passenger seat of the Saturn before buckling into my own seat.