“I’d rather not be alone tonight and want to be at the hospital early—”
“Uh-huh. You said that in your text. I mean, who was in that SUV that followed you here?”
“Oh, um . . .” Ashley glanced at the vanishing taillights. “Hunter McDermott. You met him the other night.”
“I wondered. He seemed awfully interested.”
“Interested in how I can help him.” She dared not hope for more. She couldn’t have more at this time in her life.
“How does he want your help?”
“I don’t think I should say.”
“Hello.” Heather waved her hand in front of Ashley’s face. “I’m your friend, not some stranger.”
“Yes, but—”
“And he’s not one of your patients.”
“But you are. So tell me how you’re doing. Have you, um, heard from Ian?”
“You’re not changing the subject that quickly.” Heather grabbed Ashley’s suitcase and dragged it inside. “Sit. I’ll make us some tea.” She headed for the kitchen, then stopped and whirled back. “You have your hair down.”
“I had to wash it. It was all over mud.”
“And your text said you had an intimate little dinner—”
“Cold sandwiches and soup is hardly an intimate little dinner.”
“Were you alone?”
“The cats were there.”
Heather rolled her eyes and stalked into the kitchen.
Ashley watched her friend with care. Always thin, Heather now looked gaunt. Her long, pale-blond hair hadn’t been combed in hours, if she had brushed it at all that day, and one could have landed a spaceship in the circles beneath her eyes.
Ashley followed her into the kitchen. “When did you last eat?”
“I had an apple three hours ago.” Heather slapped the kettle onto the stove.
“Not enough, and you know it.”
“I know, but it’s all I could keep down.” Heather turned a knob on the stove. The electronic ignition clicked and the gas flame whooshed to life. “I haven’t heard from Ian.”
“Oh, my dear.” Ashley wrapped her arms around her taller friend. “I’m so sorry you’re hurting. I wish I could take it away from you.”
“Why? I brought it on myself.” Heather’s voice was cold, but her body shook.
“That doesn’t mean you aren’t still worth loving.”
“Ian seems to think so.” The teakettle whistled, and Heather stepped away to pour boiling water over two tea bags. The tang of chamomile and mint rose into the air. “Do you want honey?”
“Please.”
Heather squeezed honey into the cups, added spoons, and handed a mug to Ashley. Then she led the way into the living room, where lamps glowed in the rich colors of the silk rugs Ian had brought back from Singapore. From long practice, each took an end of the sofa, kicked off their shoes, and curled up in a corner, half facing one another.
“So tell me what’s up with you,” Heather got out first. “That way I don’t have to think about me.”
Knowing focusing on someone else sometimes helped ease emotional pain, Ashley told Heather about the man in the Ford pickup, about Hunter and her attraction to a man she had no business being attracted to.
“I mean, we didn’t grow up poor,” Ashley concluded, “but his family is rich, like you only see in movies kind of rich. And he travels a lot for his job. And I have med school next year and—”
“What are you trying to talk yourself out of?” Heather smiled over the gold rim of her cup.
Ashley laughed. “Liking him. I don’t have time to care about anyone.”
“And when will you?”
“Probably never.”
A bleak future of coming home to a half dozen cats for the rest of her life flashed before Ashley’s eyes. She would have her work for the next forty years, more than likely, but after that . . . Or if something happened to her and she couldn’t work . . . And an endless string of catching other people’s babies . . .
“But Hunter McDermott is not anyone to get involved with. You should condone that sentiment. I mean, the travel and all.”
“Ashley, Ian’s travel wasn’t the problem—isn’t the problem—between us.” Heather set her cup on the coffee table and began to braid a front section of her hair. “I wanted to stop working for an ob-gyn and go freelance like you, maybe with you. Ian wanted me to quit altogether and have babies.” She dropped her hand to her belly. “I wanted them, too, but not at the expense of giving up my work. Not forever. But the fact that he thinks I can just stop serving women like a water spigot shows how little he knows or cares about me. We just fought all the time. I’m not a good enough housekeeper. He’s a slob sometimes. I spend too much money on shoes. He spends too much money on guns. Pick. Pick. Pick. Neither of us really cares about these things, but we just made them into mountains and had these screaming matches.” She sighed. “And then I accidentally took a shift the night before he was to leave for Mumbai, or some other godforsaken corner of the earth, and we had a horrible fight over the phone, of all things, with me in the hospital parking lot switching over calls because one of the patients thought she was going into labor but didn’t want to come to the hospital.”
The dispassionate level of her voice quavered and she blinked several times. “He left and a week later, one of my patients had a car accident on the way to the hospital for delivery and Ian hadn’t apologized to me yet . . .” She buried her face in her folded arms and began to sob. “I’m such a fool.”
Ashley didn’t know how all these things strung together. She didn’t need to know. Her friend was hurting, and that was all that mattered.
She slipped to her knees beside Heather and gave her a shoulder to cry on. She wanted to murmur things about calming down, about the crying not being good for the baby. She didn’t think it was. Emotional distress never made a pregnancy easy. On the contrary, if the mother didn’t take care of herself, the baby suffered.
Maybe being lonely in her old age to avoid this kind of pain wasn’t worth it. Yet in the end, Heather would have her baby.
The storm passed and, looking calmer and more relaxed than she had since Ashley’s arrival, Heather sat back and wiped her eyes on the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “I’m surprised you’re not asking me who the father is.”
“You know I never ask questions like that. That stopped being required by law two hundred years ago.”
“Imagine that—having to ask our patients in labor who the father is before we could help them.” Heather pulled a crumpled tissue from the pocket of her jeans and blew her nose. “I’m too embarrassed to tell you anyway.”
“You said Ian knows who the father is?”
“He knows.” Heather wrinkled her nose. “He asked me straight off the morning I told him. It’s funny, but he seemed relieved, like he was afraid it was someone else. But then he cried. I’ll never forget seeing him cry.”
Ashley rose. “Heather, what matters now is the baby. You have got to take care of yourself better. You need to eat. You need to sleep. You can’t keep taking extra shifts with work. Are you taking vitamins?”
“I am.”
“That’s a start.” She paced a circle around the rug in the center of the floor, then paused on the other side of the coffee table from Heather. “Do you want to make up with Ian? Or do you want to be with your baby’s father?”
“Right now, neither of them. But I change my mind by the half day.” Heather’s smile wobbled. “But I married Ian. I made a commitment to him. I love him, even if he doesn’t think so.”
“Then we’ll pray for healing there and meanwhile see that you deliver a healthy baby. All right?”
Heather bowed her head. “Okay, if God will listen to me.”
“You know he will.” Ashley gathered up their teacups. “Now let’s get to bed. I want to be at the hospital early before I go into the mountains with Hunter.”
Heather unfolded her legs and rose. “When are you goi
ng to get married and have your own babies, girl? You care so much about them.”
“When I find a man who will put up with me, and that won’t be until after med school.”
She made the remarks offhand, but as she readied herself for bed in Heather’s guest room, Ashley couldn’t get Hunter McDermott’s face out of her mind’s eye. She couldn’t forget how warm she’d felt just holding his hand there in the starlight. She couldn’t dismiss how, for the first time since she could remember, she hadn’t felt that aching emptiness.
Foolish, foolish woman. She couldn’t have it all—med school and a man in her life. Flipping her pillow over to the cooler side, Ashley determined that she would help Hunter find his mystery woman, if she could be found, and then get back to her life as it had been before he turned into her drive.
Ashley was downstairs by six thirty the next morning. Already, Heather sat at the table dressed and sipping at a cup of coffee, a plate of nibbled toast beside her. Ashley, out of reflex, started to say she hoped the coffee was decaf, then realized Heather was staring at her phone.
“Ian?” Ashley darted across the kitchen to slip an arm around Heather’s bowed shoulders.
Heather nodded and handed Ashley the phone. A short, concise text sprawled across the screen: WON’T BE BACK TO B-BURG 4 WHILE. WILL CALL 2 DISCUSS TERMS OF SEPARATION. He concluded with a time.
“I can’t blame him.” Heather’s voice was empty, flat.
Neither could Ashley.
“I wronged him terribly.”
Yes, she had.
“There’s no excuse for what I did. No forgiveness.”
“That’s not true.” Ashley smoothed Heather’s hair back from her face. “Whether you get it from Ian is one thing and up to him, not you. But God forgives.”
“I wonder if repenting means I need to give up this baby.” Heather folded her hands over her belly. “If so, then I’m out of luck. I won’t give her up. I want this baby, oddly enough.”
“I don’t find that odd. Babies are precious gifts.”
Ashley bent down so she could look into Heather’s face. “Did you do this on purpose?”
“No. No, of course I didn’t.” Heather’s eyes blazed, and she shoved away from the table. “How can you suggest such a thing?”
Ashley said nothing.
“I love my husband. I didn’t want to destroy my marriage.”
Ashley kept looking at her friend in silence.
“I wanted to make him regret how he’s been treating me, but not—Sometimes I could just hit you.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a patient has hit me.” Ashley cleared away Heather’s barely touched breakfast and went hunting for something more nutritious. “You had an affair to get Ian’s attention—I’m going to say here as a friend that was stupid—and things got out of hand. I suggest you go to the pastor for counseling when Ian comes back. Tell him that’s what you want—if it is.”
“It is. I will. What are you going to do with those oranges? I hate eating oranges.”
“I’m going to juice them. The glucose will do you more good than caffeine, which won’t do you or the baby any good.”
Ashley set about making orange juice and preparing a bowl of bran cereal for Heather, saw the time, and forgot about breakfast for herself. “I want to get over to the hospital to see my patient there. Are you going to work?”
“Of course.”
“Will you be all right?”
“Will you be all right with some madman trying to run you off the road?”
Ashley compressed her lips, then shrugged. “I am probably being paranoid. Jase will find out who it was and look into the girl’s disappearance from there.”
“Come back here tonight if you like.”
“I will.”
But for Heather’s sake, not her own.
She snatched up her jacket from the coat tree in the foyer and let herself out the front door. Fog lay over the mountains, and the sun hadn’t yet made even a hint of its appearance to burn off the mist. No excursions over the Ridge until that happened.
Disappointed that the sun might not show itself this time of year, Ashley drove to the hospital. She had gotten Mary Kate’s room number the night before, so she didn’t bother stopping at the reception desk where the young woman behind the counter was already swamped with patients going in for surgery prep and family members looking to find where they could wait for those patients. Most of the hospital employees knew Ashley. Occasionally one of her patients had to be admitted. The ones she saw nodded to her in greeting and let her pass without questions.
She reached room 312. The door was half open, so she knocked on the frame and walked in. In one bed, a woman, a stranger, watched TV while picking at her breakfast on a tray swung across her bed.
The other bed was empty.
“Excuse me.” Ashley approached the patient. “Has Mary Kate been taken for tests or something?”
“No ma’am.” The woman lowered the volume of the television with a remote control. “She got up and left with her momma this morning.”
CHAPTER 19
HUNTER’S MOTEL OFFERED oatmeal, waffles, and cold cereal, but he wanted eggs that morning. So he drove across the highway to the diner. Not until he saw the sign on the door announcing when people needed to get in their pie orders did he realize the date. Thanksgiving was next week. Mom would expect him to be at the table in Great Falls with the rest of the family, probably a few stray relatives, and perhaps a dignitary or two who couldn’t get away for some reason. No fewer than twenty people with lots of food and wine and carefully regulated conversation. It was a family holiday he never missed unless he was out of the country and the timing wouldn’t allow him to get back in time. He never wanted to miss it. Usually at least one or two of the guests possessed a store of interesting stories to tell. If nothing else, Mom’s eighty-year-old uncle would regale them with tales of his life in some vague intelligence service whose name he never mentioned. In short, he had been a spy and didn’t care if he wasn’t supposed to talk about his adventures.
“If they want to lock up this old man,” Uncle Teddy was fond of saying, “it’ll just give me time to write my memoirs.”
Hunter suspected half the stories were made up, but the old man was still entertaining. He wanted to be there, safe in the comfort of familiarity and sameness. Yet no matter how much they all cared for him, strove to assure him nothing had changed just because he knew the truth, he had changed. Residual anger remained, a sense of discomfort.
And yet how could he ever be comfortable in the mountains when half the time he didn’t understand what people were saying to him?
And then the pretty, middle-aged proprietress of the diner met him at the door with a menu and a warm smile, and he kind of liked the idea of having roots there. Most everyone he’d met on the Ridge was kind, helpful, and polite. Ashley had gone—was going—out of her way to be kind and helpful when she had no reason to be other than—
Perhaps she liked him as much as he did her?
He hoped she did so much he felt like a high school kid with his first crush. Totally ridiculous. His determination of the night before to stay there and get to know her better seemed utterly stupid. He needed to go back to work, stop burdening Justin with everything, even if his partner was more than willing to take on some of the travel work “for the sake of true love.” Justin should give up digging tunnels and write romance novels.
The notion made Ian smile, and he slipped into a booth to study the menu for what kind of eggs the diner served, even though he already knew from previous visits. He already knew he wanted an omelet. Nothing fancy here like spinach and feta. Peppers, mushrooms, and onions were the closest things to vegetables for filling. He decided no onions was best and placed his order with the server, who looked too young to be anywhere but in middle school. As she entered the kitchen, she called, “Momma, that Yankee fella wants an omelet with—” The swinging door closed, cutting off what else the g
irl shouted, and Hunter realized she probably was in middle school but working before classes started.
A vast world away from his, indeed. He hadn’t worked a real job until he entered an internship between his sophomore and junior years in college. If he had grown up here, he would probably have done something to earn money to support his mother.
Except his mother had died. Perhaps he would have ended up in a foster home or worse. Or perhaps relatives would have taken him in. He would never know. He might have never known save for that video in Portugal.
His omelet appeared, perfect in all its high-caloric glory. He needed another run. He’d needed a run last night to get the nonsense of Ashley out of his head. The hour being too late for one, he had tossed and turned and seen her every time he closed his eyes.
Her world was a world away from his. He was supposed to marry some well-bred career woman.
And if he wanted to, he would have long ago. He had plenty of opportunity. A good thing he hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine telling a wife that he wasn’t who she thought he was, that he had come from—what? Lesser people? Not hardly.
Around him, men and women ate and talked and prepared for their workdays. Some were dressed in business attire. Others looked like laborers. Two drove big rigs that were parked around the side of the restaurant. They contributed to the economy, the ebb and flow of commerce, and the human race, perhaps more productively than did the McDermotts, who tried to influence congressional votes with their reports and speeches that always made their cause look like the better option. Ashley had given up her dreams of becoming a doctor for the sake of these people, for the women.
As though his thoughts of her had conjured her from the air, Ashley flung open the door at that moment and charged through. She didn’t hesitate to look for a table or anyone; she skirted chairs and patrons and shoved her way through the kitchen door. In the seconds she took to cover the dining room, her panic showed. She was panicked and at the diner.
Mary Kate.
Hunter shot out of the booth and followed Ashley into the kitchen. She held the owner’s arm and her voice was shrill. “Where is she? Where is Mary Kate, Lucy Belle?”
The Mountain Midwife Page 19