run tomorrow to make up for it. “Fine, go fetch me some pizza, woman.”
Bell laughed and pushed to her feet. “I’m picking up Caelyn, too. Want anything for dessert?”
“No, I’m good.” I watched her cross to the door, but just before she reached it, I spoke. “Bell?” She turned, her eyes searching my face. I didn’t look away. I let her see everything I was feeling in that moment. “Thank you.”
“Anytime, sister.”
I stayed curled up on the couch, losing myself in watching the waves crash onto the rocky beach. They were ever-changing but incredibly constant at the same time. I wanted to be like those swells, continuing to come back to shore no matter what life threw at me.
A knock sounded. I pushed to my feet. “That was quick,” I said, pulling open the front door. My heart spasmed in my chest, halting altogether for the briefest of moments before stuttering and tripping back to life. “Grant.”
“Hey, Kenna.”
Two words. That was all it took for my carefully bottled emotions to come crashing out, for the memories, the most painful ones, to sink in their claws.
A vicious twinge in my belly woke me from a dead sleep. My eyes blinked open, focusing on the glow-in-the-dark stars Caelyn had dotted all over our dorm room ceiling. My stomach contracted again, and I froze.
Something was wrong. So very wrong. That feeling wasn’t something I was supposed to be experiencing. I pushed up in bed, and as I moved, I felt a sticky wetness between my thighs.
I fumbled for the light on my nightstand, grasping for the switch several times before I got it. Bell mumbled something in the background, but I couldn’t make out the words past the roaring in my ears. I flipped back the covers and screamed.
Blood. There was so much blood. Bell and Caelyn were by my side in an instant.
“Oh, God, Kenna.” Caelyn grasped my hand. “What’s happening?”
“I-I don’t know. It hurts.” But I did know. Deep in my soul, I knew that I was losing my girl. My little bean.
“We need to get her to the hospital, right now.” Bell moved through our dorm room, gathering shoes and a purse.
“Maybe we should call an ambulance.”
“No!” My hand jerked in Caelyn’s. “No, I just want to go. I don’t want to wait.”
Caelyn brushed back the hair that was damp and sticking to my forehead. “Okay, we’ll get you there. Everything’s going to be okay.”
But everything hadn’t been okay. There’d been more blood and pain, and finally, emergency surgery where my heart stopped on the operating table. My little girl was gone, and I’d been left in wreckage, broken pieces that would never fit together perfectly again.
I blinked rapidly, Grant’s face coming back into focus again. He was different, his jaw sharper, more angular. And yet he looked the same, that familiar swoop of blond hair falling into his eyes. “What are you doing here?” Ice coated my tone, a frigidity born of loss and pain and betrayal.
I saw a flicker of surprise in Grant’s expression. I wasn’t the same girl he’d left behind, no longer naïve and blindly hopeful. Life had hardened me, and I was glad for the shell it had given me now.
He smiled. That was mostly the same too, though it was a bit slicker, more practiced. “I can’t stop by my family home? I wanted to see the estate, remember my grandmother.”
“It would’ve been nice if you remembered her while she was still alive.”
A hardness slipped into Grant’s eyes. “I wasn’t sure I would be welcome.”
The assessment was fair enough. He’d been back once since he left for Boston that summer so long ago. He and his parents had come to visit a few weeks after Harriet had been diagnosed with heart disease. I’d stayed with Caelyn and the kids for the few days they were on the island. I went to work, and that was it, not wanting to risk running into any member of the immediate Abbot clan.
“And whose fault would that be?”
Grant’s expression softened, but everything about it was false, practiced. “I was a kid. You can’t exactly blame me for not being ready to be a dad.”
I hadn’t blamed Grant for being scared. Hell, I’d been terrified. But I could blame him for everything that followed. Legal paperwork demanding a paternity test. A cease and desist letter accusing me of slander. But the worst were the words I’d overheard when Harriet had called Grant and his parents from my hospital room