I can’t speak. My focus centers on a sudden, intense pain radiating all over my body. I can’t breathe. With a racing heart, I start to hyperventilate. As I battle an internal terrorist attack, a familiar voice screams for me to run for my life…
Only I can’t.
I haven’t had a panic attack in months. I’d been on medication for years, triggered by an attack in college, none of which can be taken during pregnancy. Without my anxiety meds, stopping the attack is hopeless.
Panic hits me like a rollercoaster ride with no one at the controls.
The first pain literally knocks me off my feet, and I fall over the box sitting in the middle of the foyer. Kneeling on all fours, I hold my breath as the second contraction slams into me.
No, it’s too early.
I force new air into my lungs in a vain attempt to ward off the vise clamp twisting my abdomen. Counting through the pain doesn’t work, and my vision darkens.
“Pheebs? What the hell is wrong with you?”
I open one eye and look at the tall, slender woman’s face. As I recognize the blonde waves splayed across her shoulders, the spike of adrenaline drains from my body.
Thank God…
Wrapping one hand around my stomach, I mumble unintelligible words as she shackles a firm grip on my arm. With the other, she pulls me tightly against her chest.
“Jesus Christ. What’s happening?”
“Baby. Pain… Please help.” Through blurry eyes, I watch her eyebrows scrunch in indecision, then relax in resolve.
“Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing, but hold onto me. We’ll drive around until we get to the hospital or run out of gas.”
“I don’t care if we have to go to a vet, just—oh God! Get me somewhere, now!”
Faith drags me toward the front door, and I curse as my toenails scrape across the hardwood floors. Hesitating, I grab the wall with my free arm. “Wait… Shit, I need shoes.”
“Fuck shoes.”
“I can’t go to the hospital with no shoes on. It’s February for God’s sake.”
She sighs. “Look, Pheebs, you may be tiny, but I’m not hauling your ass upstairs for shoes. This is California. You won’t die of hypothermia. Now move.”
As we reach the doorway, another pain hits, and my knees buckle.
A mumbled expletive explodes from her chest. “Damn it, Phoebe. I swear, you’re not having this baby right now. I don’t do blood, and I especially don’t deliver babies. Listen to me and breathe.”
She pulls me through the front door, my dead weight knocking over the clay pots on either side. Securing me in the passenger’s seat of her car, she slips behind the wheel. With shaking hands, she peels out of the driveway, toward the hospital.
Twenty minutes and five machines later, the only sound in the room comes from the rhythmic swoosh of the baby’s heartbeat monitor. Faith sits in the chair next to me, black streaks of mascara running down her face.
Deep frown lines form parenthesis around her mouth as she inhales slowly. “What did the doctor say?”
In the flurry of activity, needles, and wires, she’d been ushered out of the room. For the last ten minutes, neither one of us has said a word.
I wince as the IV needle in my hand shifts. “I’m still waiting for him.”
Cocking her head to the side, she squints her eyes. “Is that sound the baby?”
I run a hand down the length of my stomach, and my palm snaps back with a kick. “Yeah, it’s the heartbeat—which is doing wonders for my nerves.”
“Phoebe, what the hell happened tonight?”
“I don’t know,” I lie.
Collapsing against her chair, she rubs her temples. “Don’t hand me that bullshit. Spill it, Dalton.”
Dalton.
No one’s called me that in over three years.
She’d been my roommate and best friend while we attended college at Dreighton University, but we’d lost touch when I withdrew three months into our freshman year.
I walked away from Phoebe Dalton after my father ignored the restraining order I’d filed and attacked me. The man who brought me into this world came within millimeters of taking me out. After I’d recovered, I changed my name and turned recluse, hiding within the confines of my sister’s house.
I became Phoebe Ryan. As far as I’m concerned, Phoebe Dalton died that night in 2013 behind my Chevy Malibu.
I narrow my eyes in suspicion. “Why were you at my house?”
She busies herself deciphering the fetal heart monitor printout. “I think the real question is, what would you have done if I