If She Heard (Kate Wise Mystery #7) - Blake Pierce Page 0,1
actually here and changing their lives…especially Allen’s. First of all, Michael had stayed in the hospital for three weeks. He’d been in NICU while a team of doctors made sure he was going to gain weight. Kate missed most of this, as her own recovery was much harder than she’d expected. The strain of the birth had thrown her back out and her femoral nerves had also been damaged, causing her to occasionally lose feeling in her legs. She was finally officially released from the hospital after eleven days.
Twenty days after he was born, Michael was allowed to go home. He weighed five pounds seven ounces when Kate rested him in his bassinet for the first time. For the two days that followed, Kate had been an almost obsessive mother. She’d make sure he was breathing at least five times during each of his naps and at night; she hovered over Allen when he held their son, and she would not even let Melissa hold him.
Those two days had worn her out and that, she supposed, was what brought the depression on. She stayed in bed for eight full days, only getting up to use the bathroom and to shower on three occasions. Allen was essentially a single parent in that time, and during one of her nights of being holed up in her bed, Kate heard him sobbing.
On that eighth day, it was Melissa of all people who convinced her to get out of bed. There was a knock at the bedroom door. She assumed it was Allen and answered with a groggy “Come in.”
When she saw that it was Melissa, she wanted to cry but wasn’t sure why. She propped herself up on her left elbow, surprised at how much it hurt to do so. Staying in bed had made her quite sore.
“Lissa,” she said. “What a surprise.”
Melissa sat on the edge of the bed and took her mother’s hand. “How you doing, Mom?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Tired. Wiped out. Depressed.”
“Still having issues with your legs?”
“No, they seem okay. Haven’t lost feeling in them since I got back home.”
“Good. Knowing your legs are okay is going to make me seem like less of a bully with what I say next.”
“What is it?” Kate asked.
“I love you, Mom. But it’s time to get your ass out of bed.”
“I want to, I really do. But I—”
“No, Mom. Allen has been busting his ass this past week. I’ve helped where I can, but he only lets me do so much because he’s afraid of how you’ll react. Look…I get how weird and scary this has to be, but you need to face it. You’re fifty-seven and you just had a baby. And you survived it. Now it’s time to be a mother. And I can tell you from personal experience that you’re pretty good at it.”
Kate sat up and looked sternly at her daughter. “Allen…is he okay?”
“No. He’s exhausted and he’s afraid you’re in some bad place you won’t come back from. But I told him to get that right out of his head. You’re a rock star. He told me how you pushed through that pregnancy. And I’ve watched you reclaim a career as a female FBI agent even after you retired. You handled that…so you can handle this. More importantly, you were excited to start your career again at fifty-five. So now it’s time to be excited for this baby at fifty-seven.”
Kate nodded, and when the tears started to come, she did not fight them.
“There’s just one thing I need to let you know,” Melissa said.
“What’s that?”
“If you need me to tell you how babies are made, I can do it. Seems to me at this age, you’d know how to be safe.”
Kate burst out laughing. It hurt her sides, her stomach, and her head, but it also felt good at the same time. Melissa laughed right along with her, taking Kate’s hand again. “I mean, for real. My daughter is older than her own uncle. How the hell does that even work?”
Kate laughed even louder and leaned into her daughter. They embraced and stayed that way for so long that after a while, Kate could not tell where the laughter stopped and the crying began.
Slowly, Melissa helped Kate out of bed. She coached her through getting in the shower and even put on a pot of tea while her mother washed off. Taking a shower, as simple as it was, helped to bring Kate around a