Page 74 of Blue Norther
I nodded. “After your mother’s funeral. I just…I needed to feel close to you again. And it was still on the list of things for us to tackle on your honey-do list. So, I started with the crib, and I just sort of didn’t stop.” My fingers brushed away her tears. “If you hate it, we can change whatever you want.”
“I love it,” she whimpered. “It’s perfect. Everything I used to imagine before I gave up on this dream. I’m sorry you had to do it alone.”
“No.” I tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear as her hand landed on my chest. “Don’t be. I got to do something that gave me hope. And look where it led.”
“A true manifesting king,” she joked.
“Something like that.”
“Can I look closer at things?”
I nodded, stepping out of her way. My heart was still thumping like crazy. She groaned, her hand rubbing her belly again as she sat in the rocking chair. Her eyes drifted close, and I looked at my watch.
Still irregular. But I didn’t like how much pain she seemed to be in.
By the time I looked up from my watch, her eyes were open, locked on the changing table.
“Is that…”
I smiled, walking over to grab the blanket she’d finally seen.
“I asked for it to be released from the evidence since it had already been swabbed and photographed. I washed it in some baby detergent Jessie recommended. It’s not perfect because Icould only remember how to do a running stitch, but I hope that’s okay.”
I placed the baby blanket in her arms.
“It’s perfect, Colt. Thank you. For all of this, for—” Her gasp filled the nursery. My knees hit the floor in front of her.
“What’s going on?” Could I hear the fear in my own voice? Yes. Did I give a single fuck about it? Absolutely not.
“I think…” We waited as she breathed in and out slowly until the pain seemed to pass. “I think this is probably just prodromal labor.”
“Labor? I think you need to let me call an ambulance.” My poor heart was going to give out. I was forty-fucking-years-old, and it was the second time in only a handful of weeks that I thought I was about to have a heart attack. Violet just sat there, holding onto the arms of the rocking chair, panting through a contraction like the baby was about to exit her body in the next five minutes.
And then she laughed. “I will never understand how you can be so calm in a million different situations, but fall to pieces when it comes to me.”
“You can’t figure out why?” The rumble that tore through my chest was a perfect reflection of the tornado ripping through my soul at the sight of her in pain. In a blink, I was holding her face in my hands. Her cheeks were flushed, painted with the prettiest shade of pink I realized had been missing from my life since she walked out the door all those years ago. A shade of pink I never want to go another day without seeing.
“Why?” she whispers, her eyes as wide as saucers.
“Because I love you, Vi. I love you more than anything else in this world. I have since the day we met in seventh grade, and I haven’t stopped fucking loving you for one goddamn minute since.”
I expected to see the corner of her mouth twitch, a smile she’d work to conceal, to keep away from me even though I’d just spilled my heart out at her feet. She’d always been the more reserved one. The one who said “I love you” only when she’d thought I was asleep, or too far away to hear it.
Instead, her face crumpled and one hand went to her belly as she sucked in a harsh breath, the other grabbing onto my arm like I was her only lifeline.
“I’m calling that fucking ambulance.” There. No room for argument from her. Except there was—of course she was sitting there, shaking her head at me.
“Stop it. This could just be nothing. It’s normal to have weird contractions in the last few weeks, and it’s probably not going to progress into full blown labor. It happened the other night too, I just didn’t wake you. And they never get closer together. They never get stronger.”
Stronger?!Christ, she looked like she was about to pass out every time a contraction rolled through her. How the hell was she going to be okay if they got stronger?
“Never again, Vi. You wake me up. You let me help you, okay?”
“Hey, are the contractions back?” I asked, my voice thick with a bone-deep tiredness I hadn’t felt in a long time. My head was aching, but I couldn’t stop looking through her books for a clue I’d missed. Even after Vi went to bed, I just needed to find something that would point us in a direction for what was coming next. Anything to give us the upper hand.
I’d heard her feet pad down the hall, past my office, but when she didn’t come back upstairs after a few minutes, I decided tosee if she needed me. But the second I rounded the corner into the kitchen, I knew it wasn’t me she was searching for.
Her hand was wrapped around a fork, and it took me a minute to realize the jar in front of her used to be filled with pickled beets.
