Chapter Twenty-Seven

Rue

I wished that I could get out of the truck and run away. I didn’t want to be a part of this moment any longer. When I looked up at Richard, though, he didn’t look upset like I would expect him to. Instead, he had the hint of a smile on his lips.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he said. “You do have it. Or at least you could, if you want it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I saw you with Flora at the hotel. I saw the way that she was hugging you.”

“She was hugging me goodbye,” Richard said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Richard tried to come toward me through all of the food and reached for my hand.

“Flora had changed her mind,” he said, and I felt my heart sink. “But not about the baby. Just about me. It was a complete surprise when she called me that day. I didn’t even know that she was back in the city. I had absolutely no intention of seeing her, but she said that it was really important that we meet, that it had to do with the baby. As horrible as it sounds, until that moment I hadn’t even thought about the fact that she still had anything to do with the baby. She had been gone for so long that I had just put it behind me that she was still legally involved. When she reminded me of that I knew that I needed to see her. The plan was to meet her at her hotel, iron everything out, and then still get to the restaurant in time for our date.”

“So, what happened? What do you mean she changed her mind about you, but not the baby?”

“When I got to the hotel I could tell that she was scheming from the first second I saw her. She was wearing one of my favorite dresses and the perfume that I got her for her birthday last year.”

I held up a hand, squeezing my eyes closed for a brief moment.

“I really don’t need to hear all of this,” I said.

“The point is, none of that mattered to me. I didn’t care what she looked like or smelled like or even anything that she had to say.”

“What did she have to say?”

“She told me that she had been thinking a lot about us since she had been gone and realized that we had had a good thing going before we decided that we were going to have a baby. She saw all of the other people our age getting married and having these perfect lives, and she realized that she wasn’t going to get by in society without a husband, much less maintain the position that she wanted by not having me.”

“How romantic,” I said bitterly.

“Exactly.”

“So, what? She told you that she was jealous of all of the other people because they were married, and she realized that she had made a royal screw up by leaving you.”

“Yes, but she didn’t want to go back to what we had been. She wanted to go back before that. She wanted to go back before what she thinks is the point when everything went wrong between us.”

“When you decided to have a baby,” I said.

“Yes. She thinks that I put too much pressure on her to start a family and then when we found out that she couldn’t get pregnant, it just made things worse between us. The thing is, though…that was a lie.”

“What?” I asked, shocked by what he was telling me.

He nodded.

“I didn’t tell you before, because I didn’t know if it would matter to you, but I found out that she lied to me about it. When she went to the doctor she actually found out that she was perfectly fine.”

“Why did she lie to you about that?”

“When I called her out for it she said that even then she wasn’t convinced about the whole having a baby idea. She decided to lie about not being able to have a baby hoping that I would feel sorry for her and drop the whole idea. When I mentioned that we could consider surrogacy, she didn’t really have any way to argue with it. She had made such a fuss about wanting to be a mother, saying that she didn’t want to do a baby contract would only seem strange. I think she hoped that either the process wouldn’t work, or she could pretend to be so devastated by the whole thing that I would give up on it.”

I shook my head.

“I’m sorry, I’m not following you. Why does any of this matter?”

“When we met at the hotel she said that she wanted us to go back to before all of that and be just us again. We could go forward with our formal engagement, get married, and move on with our lives. She even suggested that one day we could have a baby of our own.”

“But what about this baby?” I asked, rubbing my belly where I could feel the baby rolling around in response to the spicy food I had eaten.

Richard reached into his pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. He handed it to me and I took it with shaking hands, unfolding it before looking down at it because I worried that if I looked at it for even a few seconds before opening it I never would. When I looked down I saw that it was a photocopy of a legal document, the letterhead indicating that it was from the surrogacy lawyer that we had been using. I read through it, my heart beating faster the further I got through the complex legal jargon. I read through it twice more before I dared look at the bottom of the page. When I did, my breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t dare allow myself to believe that I understood what those words said.

“She gave this to you?” I asked, my voice powdery.

Richard nodded.

“It completely releases her of all parental rights to the child. In essence, it says that she is no longer a part of the contract agreement and that she is to have no further involvement or obligations. She told me that she wanted me to sign one as well and get you to sign further papers nullifying the original contract. We would still pay you the full amount of the contract fee and all of your expenses, plus and extra inconvenience fee.”

“Inconvenience fee?” I asked, horrified just by the way that that sounded. “Because it’s just an inconvenience to suddenly have the people who wanted me to be pregnant in the first place to suddenly decide that they don’t want the baby?”

“According to her,” Richard said. “But that just shows even more the type of person that she is. She even suggested that we could help you find some sort of alternative situation.”

“Like farming out the baby to another couple?” I shuddered with the anger that was building through me. “So, is this what you came here to tell me? That Flora wants you back as long as you don’t come with a baby in tow, and that you want me to sign papers saying that you can just abandon the baby that you made and leave me to figure out what to do with it?”

****

Richard

I could see the pain and anger in Rue’s eyes and it was cutting through me. I never wanted to see that, I never wanted her to go through a single moment of heartache.

“Rue, I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Don’t you see? I don’t want you to be left with the baby, and I don’t want to be either. This is our baby, and I want us to raise her together.”

There were a few moments when she just stared back at me as if she didn’t fully understand what I was saying to her. Then I saw her eyes widen slightly.

“You do?” she asked.

I nodded, pushing some of the plates out of the way so that I could get closer to her.

“Of course, I do. I never stopped wanting to. I meant every single word I said to you when I told you that I saw our lives together and that I couldn’t imagine anyone being the mother of my child but you. I told Flora that it didn’t matter what she said or what she thought, that we were never going to have a life together. I told her that we had never really had a life together at all, and that there was nothing that either of us could do to try to force that to happen between us.” I slid closer to Rue and took her hands. “I told her that I was in love and that I couldn’t imagine going through life without that woman, or the baby I hoped we would raise together.”

“You did?” she asked, her voice filled with tears and barely above a whisper.

“I did. Lying to me about not being able to have a baby is the best thing that Flora ever did for me because it led me to you. I knew from the first moment that I saw you, even on a security camera screen, that there was something about you that was different, something that was special that I needed to know. Something inside me even then knew that finding you was the key to me having a happy life. I didn’t handle things the way that I should have. I shouldn’t have gone to see her without talking to you first. I should have made sure that you knew what was going on from the very first moment that I realized she had lied to me. I can’t do anything about that now. I can’t go back and fix those mistakes, though there is nothing in this world that I would like more than if I could. But I’m here with you now. I can look at you. I can touch you. I can tell you finally that I love you and I want more than I could ever express to you for us to be the family that we were always meant to be.”

Soft tears were sparkling on Rue’s cheeks now and I reached up to brush one away as she nodded. She grabbed onto my hand and held it to her skin, tilting her face to press more into the touch and closing her eyes softly as if just enjoying the feeling. When she opened her eyes again, she was smiling.

“I love you, too,” she whispered.

“You do?”

She nodded and laughed.

“Yes,” she said. “I thought that dreaming of a life with you and this baby was far too much. I thought that I was just fooling myself even pretending that it was a possibility. I tried to convince myself that I had known what I was getting myself into at the very beginning of all of this, and that anything that I was feeling was just part of it, that I didn’t have a choice and there was nothing that I could do. I hoped that I would get over it and be able to move on one day.”

“I never want you to move on,” I told her.

She shook her head.

“I never want to, either.”

I leaned forward, drawn to her by all of the emotions that I had been feeling and the promise of love and shared passion that I saw in her eyes. She moved toward me, meeting me in the middle so our mouths touched and melded together, allowing us to melt into one another. I felt no urgency in the kiss, nothing rushed or hurried. We didn’t need the desperation now.

When the kiss ended, I reached back for one of the bottles of Cletus’s Clementine Moonshine that I had sat down and popped it open. Despite Rue’s warnings, I put the bottle to my lips and took a massive swig. The moment that the burning liquid touched my tongue, I knew exactly why the festively decorated bottles had been relegated to holding open doors. I gagged, pulling the bottle away from me as fast as I could. Rue laughed, the full, rich sound of her voice filling the air around us. The moonshine seared my throat and landed in my belly like an ember and I coughed, choking on both the feeling of the raw alcohol and the taste made all the more unpleasant by the eponymous twist of clementine at the end.

“Does MacGregor grow anything in this field anymore?” I asked when I felt like I had recovered enough to force my voice through my tender throat.

“No,” Rue said, shaking her head. “Why?”

“Good,” I said, putting the bottle over the side of the bed to pour the rest of the contents onto the ground. “I just wanted to check. I’m fairly certain that nothing will ever grow again on the ground that this stuff touches.”

This sent Rue into another gale of laughter and she tossed her head back, her hands grasping at her belly as she laughed. Suddenly the sound stopped, and I looked at her to see a wide-eyed look on her face.

“Um,” she started.

“What is it?” I asked, instantly concerned.

“I think my water just broke,” she said.

I felt my heart leap up into my throat, but I shook my head.

“No, no,” I said. “That can’t be. You still have a couple of weeks to go.”

“Well, you might want to tell your daughter that because I am pretty positive my water just broke and I’m starting to feel a…” her eyes squeezed shut and her face twisted as she drew in a breath and then gasped it out, “contraction.”

“What do I do?” I asked, in a sudden panic as I realized that she really was in labor in the back of a broken down pickup truck in a dark field. “How are we supposed to get you to the hospital in time?”

“Calm down,” she said, breathing slowly now as she seemed to be in between the pains of her contractions. “There’s plenty of time. A first-time labor can last for a day. Even if it’s not that long, I’m sure that we still have hours. Just call for an ambulance that can come out here and transport me to the maternity center.” She looked up at me. “That center does have an ambulance service, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“Um,” I said sheepishly. “No. That’s one thing that I didn’t arrange for yet. Since you were the only person who was going to use the center until the baby was born, and I figured that either I would be the one to bring you there when you went into labor, or you would get induced, I didn’t set up an ambulance service.”

“Fantastic,” Rue said, her hands squeezing at the sides of her belly again as she went into another contraction.

“Don’t worry,” I said, pulling out my phone. “I’m going to get you there. Just keep breathing.”

I made a fast phone call and then tucked my phone away so that I could hold Rue’s hand, going back in my mind to the class that we took so I could try to coach her through the pain. Relief flooded through me when I heard the blades of a helicopter chopping through the air as it came toward us.

“You called a helicopter?” she asked, her voice high with surprise.

I nodded.

“We have to get you there somehow,” I said. “And that’s the fastest and safest way. Unless you want me to call up Jeb and see if he can fix Big Blue really quick.”

Rue glared at me and shook her head.

The helicopter landed a few hundred yards away and two men jumped out with a stretcher. I took Rue by the hand and helped her to her feet so that she could be ready when they got to her.

“Hey,” she said just before the two men reached the side of the truck. I looked at her and she gave me a soft, meaningful smile. “We’re going to meet our baby tonight.”