Page 67 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Debbie's crying too, mascara gone to ruin, squeezing my hand hard enough to grind bone. "I can't see anything," she says. "What are we looking at? Why are we crying?"

"That circle." I can barely get it out. "That's the nursery."

The tech hands me the tissue box like she's done it a thousand times, because she has. Then she pulls up my morning bloodwork on the second screen. "And your numbers doubled right on schedule. Textbook. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."

She prints the picture. I ask her to print two.

In the parking lot I press the second one into Debbie's hands. She squints at it.

"It's a circle, Nellie."

"I needed one other person on earth to know it's real," I say. "That's you. Congratulations. Guard it with your life."

She stops squinting. She holds it against her chest with both hands, flat, like a badge.

Then she opens her mouth, and I know what's coming before it clears her teeth.

"Get in the truck," I say. "Fight me on the road. I've got a shift at three."

***

She waits until we hit the county line. I'll give her that.

"He deserves to know."

"He does." I watch the fence posts tick by. "And he will. When he can survive it."

"Survive it? Honey, that man looks at you like you hung the—"

"Debbie. I need you to hear the whole chart before you diagnose." My voice comes out flat and clinical, and I let it, because the clinical voice is the only one that doesn't shake.

"Three weeks ago, I woke up at dawn and my bed was empty. I found him on my back porch with his dead wife's wedding ring wrapped through his fist, pressed against his mouth, shaking so hard he couldn't hear me behind him."

Her hands tighten on the wheel.

"He has nightmares, Debbie. Bad ones. He says her name in his sleep. We had one night, one, the best night of my whole life, and by breakfast he'd gone somewhere I couldn't follow. Before the coffee was even cold he'd manufactured a medical excuse, packed his duffel, and moved back to a farmhouse with fourteen stairs he can't climb." I turn and look at her. "That is a man with a wound that has not closed. You're the nurse. Tell me I'm reading the chart wrong."

She's quiet for a long mile. Cedar and fence wire and a hawk on a post.

"Nellie." Her voice has changed. Careful now. "There's something you don't know."

"Then somebody better tell me, because I'm building a life plan over here."

She pulls onto the shoulder. Puts the truck in park. Gravel dust drifts across the windshield and settles, and Debbie Sue Monroe, who has never needed a running start for a sentence, takes one.

"Claire was six months pregnant." Debbie keeps her eyes on the road. "A girl. They had the name picked. It's on the stone, Nellie. Tater stood at that graveside and read it, and Owen has never said it out loud since. Not once. Not to anybody."

"He buried them together. One casket."

The cab goes very quiet. Somewhere outside a grasshopper is singing like nothing happened.

"He didn't tell you because he can't say it," she says.

I look down at my hands. They're folded over my stomach. I don't remember putting them there.

A daughter. He lost a daughter, and a wife, in one night, to the thing he does for a living, and I have been sleeping next to that and I never knew, and now there is a printout in my purse and I am supposed to walk into his farmhouse and hand it to him.

"Honey." Debbie reaches for me. "I told you because it means he loves big. It means—"