Page 20 of Ever After All

“Everyone but you as soon as we saw you with him,” I replied.

My thoughts spun to Wyatt. I couldn’t help but wonder if anybody had similar thoughts when they saw us together. The intensity of my reaction to him when we happened to be in each other’s vicinity was startlingly powerful. I kept thinking it would dissipate

McKenna and I walked in together, hopping into the back of the line. As if the universe knew I was thinking about Wyatt, the café door opened a moment later with the friendly bell chiming. Before I even glanced in the direction of the door, my body knew Wyatt had just entered the café. Goose bumps rose on the back of my neck with a little jolt of electricity zipping through my body.

I told myself I was imagining things, but then McKenna exclaimed, “Griffin! Wyatt!”

I could totally play it cool. No one needed to know what was going on with Wyatt and me. But then, I wondered why I wanted to keep it a secret. I worried that everyone would have an opinion, and if it didn’t work out, everyone would also have an opinion about that. Maybe not everyone, but certainly our friends, most of whom were mutual.

And when he breaks your heart, how will you keep that a secret?

Even though I didn’t like to think about it, I knew why I let things die on the vine back when we had our week-long fling. I hadn’t even had to avoid him then because he went his way, and I went mine. He hadn’t been living here in Fireweed Harbor, so there was nothing to avoid. Much as I tried to pretend it hadn’t been that good with him, that was such a lie. That week had been insanely hot. All this time, I’d tried to convince myself it had been a fluke.

No one had measured up since then, not even close. Although it would’ve been easier if it was just the burning-hot chemistry, I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t want to be hopeful, but my heart sure did. Little drumbeats of hope and wishfulness got loud every time I let myself think too much about Wyatt.

You don’t know if it’s going to work out. You have perfectly good reasons for being careful.

Careful. That was what I told myself it was. I’d been old enough to have a fairly vivid memory of what it had been like when my mother had died unexpectedly. She’d gone to the hospital to give birth to my little brother and never came home. What was supposed to be a joyful event had been devastating. The grief had been a shock of such force, I’d felt knocked flat and hadn’t really known how to process any of it.

I’d also witnessed what it did to my father. He had been utterly distraught and trying to hold it together for me and his new baby boy.

My mother had spiraled into a medical condition called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) after she gave birth. I only knew this because I came across my mother’s medical records when my father asked for help shredding old tax documents. He must’ve forgotten they were there. I’d been in nursing school at the time and asked one of the OB-GYNs on staff about it. DIC wasn’t specific to childbirth. In short, it was when all the complicated steps involved in blood clotting went haywire. Blood could clot where it wasn’t supposed to and run freely where it should be clotting. It could be triggered after major physical trauma of any kind, infection, and more. Women with childbirth complications were at risk of DIC, and it could rapidly become a dire medical situation.

In the medical world, there was a phrase: All bleeding stops. Either a person’s blood clots properly or a person lost enough blood to die. In all cases, the bleeding stopped. Modern medicine was not magic. If a person’s blood wasn’t clotting properly, medical professionals could only do so much to save them. My mother had faced something that even the best hospitals and doctors in the world could only pray to stop. No medical professional wanted to consider it, but in some cases, it could truly boil down to luck if someone pulled through. My mother wasn’t lucky that day.

She’d been able to hold my brother while she’d been dying, and I could only wonder what that must’ve been like for her. I was terrified that the same thing might happen to me. Even though I knew the chances were slim, and it was one of those fluke situations.

All this to say, I didn’t want to be distraught if I lost someone the way my father had. I was afraid to have a child. Statistically speaking, the odds were in my favor, but then we tended to forget just how dangerous having a baby could be in the modern era.

“Are you okay?” Tessa’s voice broke through my train of thought.

I glanced toward her. “Oh, yeah,” I said quickly.

I didn’t even know why my thoughts had detoured. That train of thought was a dead-end road I got stuck in sometimes, one where I couldn’t change anything that happened.

Wyatt was at the counter with Griffin, and McKenna was talking with him about something. I could feel Tessa’s gaze on me still. I glanced back in her direction. “What?” My tone was defensive.

Tessa’s brows hitched up slightly. “What’s with you and Wyatt?”

“What do you mean?”

She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling but then gave up, shrugging with a little grin. “Just that, it’s kind of obvious you two…”

“We what?” I willed the heat to dissipate from my cheeks to no avail because my face was on fire.

“You look at him a lot, he looks at you a lot, and it’s obvious you might like each other.”

The look on my face must’ve given away my distress. Tessa took pity on me. “If it helps, I understand why you might not want to do anything about it or want to talk about it. I mean, if you are doing anything about it, or thinking about doing anything about it,” Tessa clarified when my eyes widened in alarm. “That’s how I felt when things started with Adam and me. We all share the same friends. And even if we didn’t, this is a small town. Gossip is a real thing. If you’re hoping to keep things private, or see how they go, or get your heart broken privately—” Tessa cut off sharply.

I knew I must’ve looked horrified or maybe already distraught. She reached over and squeezed my hand across the table quickly. “Wyatt is not going to break your heart.”

I forced myself to breathe slowly. “How do you know?”

Tessa wasn’t one to gossip, so I decided to let down my guard a little.

“Because he’s a nice guy. I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m certainly not expecting you to tell me now or even later. But the whole family shares the same baggage. You know it. Everybody deals with things differently, and I’m not sure how Wyatt has dealt with it. But I know he’s a good man. Remember, he’s the one who helped McKenna be open about what happened to her with Jake.”

All I could do was take in what she was saying because, at that moment, I heard McKenna’s voice behind us.

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