When her stomach stopped feeling as if it were turning itself inside out, she grabbed some tissues from the box of Kleenex on the counter and wiped her lips. Then she leaned under the faucet at the small stainless-steel sink and washed the sour taste from her mouth. Pregnant, she thought again, struggling to process. Pregnant!
Her eye fell on a pictorial representation of a woman’s body in the last trimester, the position of the fetus, the swelling of the mother’s abdomen. Tentatively, she placed her hand over her still quivering midsection.
The doctor bustled in a few minutes later. She was in her fifties, with thick, steel-gray hair that curved beneath her chin and looked surprisingly chic and healthy. Behind frameless glasses, her eyes were a startling light blue and peered at you as if you were a specimen in ajar. Dr. Schuster worked hard to effect pregnancies, but she didn’t exhibit a warm and fuzzy manner.
Andi confessed, “I threw up in your trash can.”
“We’ll take care of it. I understand you think you’re pregnant?”
“My doctor, Dr. Ferante, just told me I was.”
“Okay.”
She gave Andi a routine exam, and once again her blood was drawn. The doctor looked thoughtful but wasn’t going to give out any answers before she was ready. It was another ten minutes before she returned to the room and, holding Andi’s file to her chest, said with a slight softening of her manner, “Yes, you are pregnant.”
Heat flooded Andi’s system. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Greg’s been gone for three months.”
“That’s about how far along you are.”
“After all this time . . . all the effort,” Andi said now, swallowing.
“When the stress is off, sometimes it happens like this.”
Andi knew that. She just hadn’t completely believed it.
She and Dr. Schuster talked about what was in store in the next few months: a healthy diet, light exercise, plenty of rest. At the reception desk Andi consulted the calendar on her cell phone and lined up future appointments. She left the medical offices in a state of wonderment, driving back toward her house, the one she’d just sold, feeling like she was living a dream. She wondered briefly if she should have held on to the house, but it was too late now. She’d purchased one of the older cabins on Schultz Lake, the very lake that was the scene of Wren Development’s latest endeavor—a lodge at the north end that had just begun construction—and her real estate agent had delivered the keys the night before. She’d sold the house she’d shared with Greg because that part of her life was over.
She pulled into her drive. Andi still had some packing to do and the new buyers were giving her through the weekend to move. She’d managed to box up most of her belongings, forcing herself to fill one box per day or it would never happen, but now the push was on. Even though she was pregnant, she had a renewed sense of energy. What had seemed like an insurmountable task now felt doable.
Pregnant . . . !
Her cell buzzed as she was climbing from the SUV. She looked down to find a text from her best friend, Trini.
Tomorrow at the club?
Andi and Trini had a long-standing Tuesday/Thursday morning workout schedule, which Andi had completely abandoned after Greg’s death. Now she texted back You bet and immediately received All right! along with a winking emoticon happy face.
Would she tell Trini about the baby? No . . . not yet. Ditto Carter and Emma. She needed some time to process this. It felt too precious to reveal yet. She had no doubt Carter and Emma would be horrified. She was already the interloper, and now Greg’s child . . . She could already hear them talking about her behind her back, perhaps mounting a lawsuit to claim back the company; that would be just like them.
Her pulse fluttered as she thought about when she would deliver the news. She was three months and not even showing. She had time. Greg’s brother and sister were trying to put a good face on the fact that she was both majority stockholder and a capable business associate, but it was taking all they had. Since Greg’s death they’d been too involved in other business problems, chiefly the quiet war Wren Development was having with the Carrera brothers, who were trying to take over all the properties surrounding Schultz Lake, to put all their concentration on Andi’s position in the company. The Carreras were thugs who used fair means or foul—mostly foul, actually—to achieve their goals; they had tried to put a moratorium on building, not for any reason other than to stop the Wrens. Greg, Carter, and Emma had been handling the project, which involved slogging through and complying with all the county ordinances on the one hand, and dealing with twins Brian and Blake Carrera on the other. Greg’s death had put Andi in the thick of it even while she moved through life as an automaton, but the project had moved forward anyway.