Page 48 of Unbroken

“Thank you for inviting me. I thought I was going to be late, but I’m the first one here?”

Hazel climbed onto a barstool and sipped her drink, pointing at the stool across from her. I sat down as she said, “I actuallyasked you to come over early. I figured we could use this time to…talk.”

My glass froze mid-air and inches from my lips.

“I promise this isn’t an ambush. I thought about asking you to lunch, but last time we had lunch, both of us were kidnapped before it ever began.”

I nearly choked on my saliva. She wasn’t wrong, but damn, I wasn’t expecting that. I looked up at her, and when I saw the small grin tugging on the corner of her lips, I couldn’t contain my own smile.

We both laughed, and I was so thankful for the levity it brought.

“We never got a chance to know each other back then, and well, I know how much you mean to…everyone. I want that opportunity. We can try tobond.”

Surprised laughter bubbled up from my chest, and the feeling stirring there felt mildly like hope and relief.

“You’re serious?”

She nodded. “Absolutely. I’m not going to lie and pretend that you weren’t my favorite person for a really long time. But there’s more to every story, and I will say, everyone believed that. They obviously didn’t know the extent, but Blakely, they never believed that you would have done something like that. And I want to know the woman that instilled that kind of faith and trust in all my favorite people.”

I didn’t even get the stinging warning behind my eyes. Suddenly I was just crying, and Hazel reached out and gripped my thigh.

“Well, shit. I didn’t mean to make you cry,” she said.

I chuckled and wiped my eyes. “You’re just so nice.”

She shrugged, and I was able to compose myself with a few deep breaths. “I…umm…read your book.”

Hazel’s eyes widened, and she sipped her drink. “I wish there was prosecco in this. I’m sorry if?—”

“No,” I said quickly, cutting her off before she could apologize. “Please don’t apologize for anything. You could have dragged me through the dirt and made me out to be the worst person alive. You could have done that, because it was definitely warranted.”

Hazel propped her hands on her belly and winced again. She breathed through the pain, and it was on the tip of my tongue to say something. But she opened her eyes and smiled. “I wouldn’t have done that. Like I said, stories are complex. There are multiple points of view, and I could only tell my side of it. Your side wasmuchmore intricate. Those details we didn’t know at the time were important, and if I’d tried to guess, I would’ve been absolutely wrong. Although it is fiction, I could have fibbed. I just didn’t want to.”

A lightness washed over me. Hazel was right, stories were complex, and often the ones most worth telling were the hardest. But it was so rewarding. If I hadn’t gone back to Texas and found the strength to tell it, my life would be so…empty.

“So, how are you settling back in?”

Hazel was laughing so hard, she kept crossing her legs, trying not to pee her pants.

I’d just finished telling her about one of our college antics that ended in both Luke and Devon rescuing the rest of us while we were marooned in the middle of a lake.

Hazel finally caught her breath, and her laughing abruptly came to a halt as she winced again. That time she massaged the bottom of her stomach and made an “O” shape with her lips.

We’d been sitting there for an hour “bonding,” as she’d referred to it. And it was no surprise that Hazel was just as great as I knew she would be. My friends were great judges of character—apart from the one mishap.

But Hazel had been in pain the entire time. Every once in a while, she’d wince and hold her stomach or brace her elbows onthe counter to breathe through it. Each of the pains subsided somewhat quickly, but this one wasn’t going away.

“Are you okay? Should I call Luke or?—”

She shook her head, but her face screwed up even more. “No, all the guys are at some barcade, and I don’t want to bother him. I’ve been having those stupid fake contractions for a few days, too. But Blakely, I don’t think?—”

Her eyes suddenly went wide, and she tried to look around her stomach. She rolled her lips and slid off the barstool. When she turned around, she gasped and mumbled a curse under her breath.

“I think I’m in labor,” she said. She spun around and motioned to the small wet spot on her barstool. I glanced down and saw a twin spot blooming over her leggings.

“Oh, fuck. You think?”

“Yes, I think. I think that was my water breaking, but,” she said, the panic rising in her voice. “I don’t know for sure. I’ve never done this before.”

---