BRIANNA WAS ON the way to Treasures to look for some furniture for her third-floor apartment when her phone buzzed.
“Hi,” she greeted Kylee, who, despite plans for the bachelorette party all worked out over tea and scones at the Mad Hatter, had kept checking in several times a day about every little detail. And Brianna had thought she was a control freak.
“If you’re calling about the party, don’t worry. I’ve got the menu planned, the grocery list made, and you and Mai are going to be taste testers for the B and B recipes Mom promises I can pull off for a crowd without any problem. With any luck I won’t poison anyone.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m calling. The party’s off.”
“Oh, no.” Brianna’s heart sank. “Don’t tell me you and Mai broke up? You’re so perfect together.”
“We are. And we haven’t. Broken up, that is. We’re going to be moms.”
“I know.” Brianna had bought three sets of onesies and a padded piano keyboard that tied to crib bars to allow a baby to kick against it and play music. “But that’s still two weeks away. What does it have to do with the party?”
“It was supposed to be two weeks,” Kylee said. “But apparently our child is going to turn out to be more like me than Mai. Because our birth mother just went into labor.”
“Wow! That’s so exciting!”
“And scary,” Kylee said. “But the doctor assures us that thirty-eight weeks is a safe zone. But, of course, I’m already chewing my nails off.”
“I’m on my way.” Furniture shopping could wait. Friendship came first.
“Thank you. Mai’s her usual Zen sea of calm, but I can tell that she’s as nervous as I am. I am upset about one thing.”
“What?”
“One of the reasons Seth was rushing on the house was to get us moved in in time for the wedding before we became parents. I’m not worried about the wedding. That’s just a technicality. But I did want to bring our daughter home to the house she’ll grow up in.”
“And you didn’t let me buy any baby furniture,” Brianna heard Mai say in the background.
“I didn’t want to jinx the adoption,” Kylee said. “I’m Scottish. We’re a superstitious people.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Brianna said. “This is an easy problem to fix.” Certainly easier than many she’d handled over the years. “You just stay calm so you won’t upset the mother. Calm’s got to be better for the baby, right?”
“Right.” She heard Kylee blow out a long breath. Then another. A third. “Okay. I’ve found my center. Now I’m going to go back into the labor room. See you soon.”
“Soon,” Brianna agreed. As she turned around in the direction of the hospital, she hit the icon on the phone.
Seth answered on the first ring. “That was fast.”
“Change of plans. I’m on the way to the hospital.”
“Is your mom okay? Your dad?”
“Everyone’s fine. Kylee and Mai’s baby has decided to make an early appearance. I’m going to offer moral support, but I need a favor.”
“Just name it.”
“You and Dad are the only two guys I know in town with trucks. I need everything moved out of Kylee and Mai’s apartment into their new house.”
“Sure, I can do that.”
“You’ll need me to get a key.”
“I’m a contractor,” he reminded her. “I know how to jimmy locks.”
Of course he did. “While you guys are moving furniture, I’m going to ask Mom to find something to put the baby in.” Kylee’s own mother had tragically died in a car accident four years ago. “I figure being the principal she can leave school early and find a bassinet or something either at Treasures or in Port Townsend or Port Angeles.”
For a moment, when he didn’t respond, Brianna thought she’d lost the connection. “Don’t bother,” he said finally. “I’ll take care of that.”
He didn’t need to say any more. Remembering Zoe’s emails about the nursery they’d been planning, she guessed that Seth must have furnished the room as a surprise for her. The same way he’d kept her car clean and running. As she realized that he must have kept that room the way it had been two years ago, and what he was now planning to do, her eyes misted. Wiping the tears away so she could concentrate on arriving at the hospital without having an accident, she bit her lip. “Are you sure?”
Another pause, shorter than the earlier one. “Yeah. I am... Tell Kylee and Mai not to worry. I’ll pull some of the crew off the old lighthouse keeper’s house they’re working on and we’ll have them moved in by tonight.”
After thanking him again, Brianna called the farm. Then, with her heart and thoughts torn between the about-to-be mothers and the special man she’d given her heart to years ago, Brianna turned down Quinault Road to Honeymoon Harbor General Hospital.
* * *
IT WAS EVEN harder than he had thought it would be when he’d made the offer to Brianna. Seth hadn’t opened the nursery door since the day he’d been notified of Zoe’s death. Hadn’t wanted to because everything inside the room represented a shared dream that, as much as he knew it would never happen, he couldn’t let go of.
On the other hand, two women who’d become friends enough to ask him to be in their wedding needed him to step up and open that damn door. After all, someday he was going to have to. He couldn’t spend his life like Miss Havisham, who, after having been jilted at the altar, spent the rest of her life alone in her decaying mansion, never taking off her wedding dress and leaving the moldering wedding cake on the table.
He’d had to read Dickens’s Great Expectations his senior year of AP English. Okay, two chapters into the book, he’d thrown in the towel and cheated by reading the CliffsNotes. But they were still detailed enough for him to find the story ridiculously over-the-top melodramatic. People got ditched. They divorced. And sometimes the one you loved with your entire heart, the one you’d planned to live the rest of your life with, the one in which all your great expectations lay, died.
Although he hadn’t set all the clocks and his watch to the time those officers had arrived at his and Zoe’s house, the way the old spinster had kept the clocks in the mansion set to the exact time she got the letter from the con man who’d defrauded and jilted her, by keeping this door closed for the past two years, he’d metaphorically behaved the same way.
He took a deep breath, and turned the handle.
Thanks to Megan’s Clean Team, unlike the decaying old mansion, there were no cobwebs, no mold, no rodents. The crib, which was designed to turn into a twin bed when their child got older, was a bright white, painted with an enamel guaranteed not to chip off when a teething baby gnawed on it. The bars were close together, per the new safety standards she’d found online, and the mattress was covered with a quilt his mother had made. Hot air balloons, in all the bright primary colors Zoe had insisted on, flew upward in each of the twelve squares of blue cloth sky. Riding in the baskets were baby elephants, bears, dinosaurs, dragons, ducks and more. Along each of the borders read, “Oh, the places you’ll go.”
A mobile he’d found online of Zoe’s beloved orcas, in bright, whimsical colors, hung over the crib.
His father had surprised him by building not just a rocking chair, but a white dresser with each of four drawers painted in the colors of the quilt. Zoe’s parents had provided the changing table along with the best safety car carrier on the market.
In the corner of the room was the bassinet that would be moved into their bedroom when they brought their newborn home. Made of see-into mesh, it had all the bells and whistles. It rocked, swiveled and had adjustable white noise sleep sounds, and the sides lowered, allowing the baby to sleep at the same level next to Mom and Dad, but not in the bed, which, Zoe had read, and their own doctor had agreed, was a lovely idea, but also increased the risk of suffocation and SIDS. Needless to say, it was the most expensive one made, but he’d been willing to pay anything to keep his child safe and his wife worry-free.
But he hadn’t been able to keep his wife safe. And the child she might have been thinking about in those last seconds of her too-short life would never be conceived. Never born.
When the pain hit him like a sledgehammer in the gut, he dropped the toolbox he’d been carrying, doubled over, hands on his thighs, head spinning as he struggled to keep from passing out.
“You can do this, dammit,” he muttered as vertigo had him swaying on his feet. “Not just for Kylee and Mai, but for yourself.” He also knew gifting the new mothers with this nursery Zoe had put so much thought and love into was exactly what she’d want him to do.
So, picking up the toolbox, he pushed through the pain and guilt that he’d been carrying around for all this time and got down to business dismantling Kylee and Mai’s crib.