Page 174 of Sugar & Shadows

My next breath came easier. Like a weight had been removed from my chest.

“But we’ll put you on a fetal monitor overnight and keep an eye on things,” she said, still typing. “Ooh,” she said.

Heart stumbling, I darted a look at her, then the screen.

“Did you see that?” She pointed to the monitor.

Sure enough, after a moment, the fetus jumped. The doctor zoomed in a bit. “That’s a little kick,” she said. “At this stage of gestation, we can see wiggling and some movement.”

Cue the waterworks.

She was moving.

“Look at those legs,” Gabe said, his own tears cascading down his face.

She was active, kicking and rotating, keeping us entertained. “That’s the top of her head,” the doc explained. “And that,” she said as the screen blurred in a way it hadn’t yet, “is an arm flail. Someone has a lot of energy.”

“Oh my God,” Gabe said as she did it again, a tiny arm floating above her head. “Is she waving to us?”

The tears were coming harder now. This might have been the most beautiful moment of my life. Our little girl was saying hello.

Suddenly, Gabe was no longer beaming beside me. Instead, he had gone even paler, and he was shaking.

“Are you okay?”

He nodded, squeezing my hand.

I looked down at our entwined fingers, and my stomach bottomed out. “Your hand is purple.”

He sucked in a breath. “Yeah, I don’t feel too great. Also, I can’t feel my toes.”

We were both admitted. Me for fetal monitoring and Gabe for mild hypothermia and frostbite. Apparently when a person runs into a snowbank with no cold gear on, injuries happen.

Jasper would never let him live this one down.

After his shift, he’d brought us flowers, food, and get-well cards from the entire town. Apparently nine hours—overnight—and a snowstorm did not slow these people down.

“Still can’t believe Romeo over here almost died of exposure trying to rescue you,” he said, shaking his head.

“Not exposure. Just a little frostbite,” Gabe grumbled. “Like you have any room to talk. I seem to remember you disobeying orders and crawling through a burning building to save the mother of your child.

That shut his cousin up quickly.

We’d talked them into putting us in the same room, and all night, nurses were in and out, checking my monitor and periodically taking Gabe’s temperature and wrapping him in fresh heated blankets.

I tried not to laugh when the doctor scolded him, telling him he could have lost a toe.

“I was emotionally compromised,” he’d say every time. “The love of my life and our child were in danger.”

That was how Gabe won over all the nurses. And it was why we were now getting VIP treatment. Or he was, at least, with the staff constantly cooing over him and his poor toes.

Meanwhile, not one of our visitors agreed to bring my laptop or at least a working phone. Mine hadn’t been retrieved from my vehicle, as far as I knew.

“I’m bored,” I declared after a while.

Gabe rolled his eyes and reclined in bed. “Nolan will be here soon to take your statement. So many of us showed up all at once, which was great for rescuing you, but it meant there were too many tracks to determine what type of vehicle ran you off the road. But Meg is combing every highway camera from here to Quebec.”

Okay, that was mildly satisfying. If anyone could find that fucker, it was my best friend.