Chapter 13

Don’t take advice from me. You’ll just end up fucking drunk.

-Reed’s secret thoughts

Reed

I was mid-exam, my fingers in a woman’s unmentionables as I was checking her cervix for dilation, when a polite knock sounded at the door.

I ignored it, pulled my fingers out, and stripped off my glove.

“You’re at a solid two dilated, but that’s fairly normal at thirty-nine weeks. If you experience any more contractions, I want you to time them. If they get to three minutes apart or less, that’s when it’s time to go to the hospital. Okay?”

I offered her my hand and helped her to sitting, and she looked like she was ready to start freaking out all over again.

The first-time mother nodded her head, but her eyes went to her husband.

“Bags packed?” I asked.

He nodded, looking just as nervous as the mother.

I kept my laugh in check.

If he was freaked out now, I couldn’t wait to see him during delivery.

“Alrighty, then.” I threw my gloves into the trash and walked to the sink, washing my hands thoroughly.

Once I was through, I said my goodbyes, and paused when I saw the woman on the other side of the door.

Caria.

She just wouldn’t catch the hint.

Every single time she made a move, I made sure to put myself well out of her reach, yet she just kept trying.

In all honestly, it was fucking annoying.

It was getting to the point where I wanted to report it to Torres.

“Yes?” I asked curtly.

Caria batted her eyelashes at me. “You have a patient in room four with what she suspects is an ectopic pregnancy.”

I didn’t want to reply to her, but for the sake of being a professional, I did anyway.

“Whose patient is she?”

“Dr. Torres,” she answered.

“Is Dr. Torres busy?”

I could hear him fucking laughing about something in the breakroom, so he wasn’t busy enough for Caria to be bringing his patient to me.

“Umm,” she paused, trying to come up with something she could say to get her out of the mess I had a feeling she knew she’d gotten herself into.

Before I could tell her to go tell Dr. Torres about his patient, the door separating the inner office from the outer office slammed open, and my brother hurried inside.

“Baylor?”

“Lark called me,” he said. “I tried to call you, but you’re not fu-freakin’ answering.” He glanced around the office. “Krisney’s dog was killed.”

My stomach dropped.

“Caria, tell Torres I’m leaving.”

***

When I arrived at the vet, Krisney wasn’t there.

Lark was, though, and she looked extremely sad.

“What happened?” I asked, hurrying up to the counter.

She looked at me sadly. “The dog’s leg was caught in a trap outside Krisney’s property. He bled quite a bit and before we could repair the damage, he was already gone. But Reed, the problem is that kind of a wound shouldn’t have caused that kind of blood loss. So Dr. Castleberry looked around in the chest cavity after he’d passed and found that he had cancer. All over. It was so bad, that the dog literally would’ve only had a few more weeks at most to live.”

I felt like somebody had walked up to me and punched me directly in the chest.

“Does she know?”

Lark nodded. “We told her about an hour ago. She left with his body.”

I didn’t wait to reply to that.

I knew what she was going to do.

She was going to bury him, and I couldn’t let her do that alone.

I didn’t bother driving to her parents’ place.

There was no way in hell that she was going to bury him there. Her parents had hated that dog, and honestly, Pepé hadn’t been too fond of living there since he was forced to be in her room the entire time.

He was much happier once Krisney had moved out.

I drove to the old house, the memories assaulting me as I made my way to the place that used to be our refuge.

The old house was located directly next to the apartments that I used to reside in during my undergraduate studies.

The start of forty acres butted up right to the back door where my apartment had let out, and I let myself feel the excitement that always assaulted me when I pulled into the old driveway that looked like it needed updating way before even we came along.

I wasn’t surprised to find Krisney’s old car.

Nor was I surprised when I walked around the backside of the house to find her digging with a shovel.

Though, it did make me angry.

She wasn’t overly pregnant yet, but she was still pregnant enough that she shouldn’t be digging a fucking grave for a dog when she had a perfectly capable man to do the job for her.

“Kris,” I called out, reaching for the shovel. “Let me do that.”

She startled, and when I caught my first good look at her face, the nausea was back.

She was crying silent tears as she dug.

Fuck.

I dropped the shovel and pulled her into my chest, dropping my head to rest against her hair.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

I wish I’d have been here.

She sniffled against me, and I wrapped her tighter.

“He warned me,” she swiped away tears.

I pulled back so only my arms were around her.

She stepped away even further, feeling like she was taking my heart straight out of my chest as she did.

“Who warned you?” I questioned, wanting to go to her so badly it hurt.

“The owner that I bought the property from. He said that there were some old traps out there, but I didn’t give it thought, you know?”

I tilted my head, but didn’t speak as I let her get out whatever she was trying to say.

And she didn’t hesitate to continue.

“He said he wasn’t in the right frame of mind when he came home from the war, and put up a lot of traps. But Reed, you and I were all over that land when we were younger. Never once did we see any traps.”

We hadn’t.

Though, we hadn’t been warned about them, either.

“I should’ve taken his words to heart, but I didn’t. I thought that since we’d been all over the land, that there weren’t actually any out there. He said he’d done his best to clean them all up. If I’d known…”

“You didn’t,” I whispered. “You didn’t know that there were any more out there. And honey, the doc told me that Pepé was sick anyway. He said he bled out too fast, from a small wound. They decided to have a look around while they had him opened up. He was riddled with cancer.”

She shrugged.

So she knew.

“Baby,” I brushed her hair out of her eyes. “You would’ve lost him anyway.”

She swallowed, causing her throat to bob.

“Yeah, but I would’ve gotten extra time. I would’ve gotten to say goodbye.”

With nothing else to say to that, I held her in my arms for as long as she would let me. When she finally pushed away, I got to digging.

When the hole was deep enough, I reached for the cloth-covered body that used to be Pepé, and lowered him into the ground.

At one point, I caught Krisney’s movement out of the corner of my eye, and looked up to find her squatted down, her hands covering her face.

I felt sick to my stomach, watching this woman—my woman—go through something so terrible.

Not to mention she’d had to witness it in the first place.

But with dirt on my hands, and sweat pouring off of me, I stayed where I was and finished doing what I would never want Kris to have to do.

The moment that the last shovel full of dirt went onto the mound, I wiped my hands off on my scrub top and turned to find her still in the exact same position.

“Baby…”

My phone went off, and I sighed as I looked at the message.

“I have to go. It’s a woman in labor.” I apologized.

I went in to hug her to me once more, but she stopped me with an upraised hand.

“I don’t think this is a good idea anymore.” she whispered. “I want you to leave me alone, and when I come to your office, I want to see someone else.”

I felt what felt like a lead balloon fall in my stomach.

“Kris…”

“Just go.”