Page 24 of The Last Trip

He sighs, turning away from me to adjust his shirt in the mirror. “I can’t do this right now. I think you need to sleep, okay? Clearly, you’re not getting enough sleep.”

I glare at him. “You did not just say that to me.”

“I’m sorry.” He scratches his forehead. “I’m tired, too. I just…look, the picture could’ve been knocked off the wall at some other point, and we just didn’t notice it. Maybe I picked it up and put it somewhere else and forgot about it. No one has any reason to break in and steal a photo and nothing else.”

“Did you move it?” I demand. “Seems like something you’d remember.” Another pain hits my stomach, and I groan.

His gaze rakes over me, clocking my distress. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I’m not telling him about the pains yet. I don’t want him to have yet another thing to call me paranoid about. “If you’re going in to work this morning after all, I’m going to go out for a bit.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No. I’m okay,” I tell him. “I just need some air, I think.”

“Are you mad at me?” He sounds so broken it cracks a wall inside me.

“No,” I tell him, kissing his cheek. “Of course not. I just need to cool down from all the stress. Baby girl and I are going to go to the park for a walk.”

He studies me for several seconds, but eventually he nods. “You’ve got your pepper spray?”

“Always.”

“And you won’t overdo it? No running. No uneven surfaces.”

“Yes,father,” I groan, rolling my eyes.

“I just want you to be safe.” He places his palm on my stomach. “You’ve got precious cargo in there, you know?”

I smile, but it’s sad. I don’t feel connected to my expression at all. In fact, I’m starting to feel less and less connected to Cal, too. “So I’ve heard.”

At the doctor’s office, it comes as no surprise that my blood pressure is sky high. The doctor does a good job of pretending not to be too worried, but I can tell she is.

“I’m going to have you wait in another little waiting area for about half an hour,” she informs me, an uneasy smile on her face. “Then we can recheck it and hope it’s gone down some. Baby’s heartbeat sounds good, and we’ll take a look at the ultrasound too, but I want that blood pressure down, or we’re going to have to talk about bedrest or possible induction. I want to avoid that if we can. You’re far enough along that if you had to deliver, her chances are great, but each extra day we give her lungs is just better for her odds. So, we’ll weigh the risks and benefits depending on what we see from your blood pressure and the ultrasound. Any questions for me right now?”

I swallow, my throat dry, and shake my head. “I don’t think so.” I’m going to do everything in my power to lower my blood pressure for this baby girl. As we walk out of the room, I find myself grinning over a scene from a sitcom I love where a character tells another he can raise and lower his blood pressure at will. If only I had such luck.

She leads me to a small, empty waiting room and hands me a bottle of water with instructions to wait here for a nurse to get me. I pull a book out of my bag and try to focus on the story, breathing in and out steadily to slow my racing heart. As stressed as I am, this isn’t good for the baby, and I have to think of her first.

I have to calm myself down.

Though I’m not calmed down. I’m still activelythinkingabout calming down when a middle-aged nurse comes to find me half an hour later. “Sadie?”

I stand abruptly, slipping my book back into my bag. It’s only then I realize I didn’t make it through a single page. I’ve never been good at drowning everything out. I worry and obsess and make the smallest things my biggest focus until they’re resolved. It’s never been more frustrating to me than when my daughter’s health is at risk.

“I’m going to take you back to your room and get your blood pressure, and then I’ll take you to the lab for an ultrasound,” she says, her voice monotonous.

“Okay, great.”

She leads me down the hall, and it’s only as she’s opening the door to the room that I realize this is all wrong. “Oh, this wasn’t my room.”

I turn to face her, prepared to leave, but she’s blocking me in and staring at me as if I’ve lost my mind. She blinks. “Yes, it was.”

I stare around at the room that’s so different from the one I was in half an hour ago. This room has a window, that one did not. This one has chairs on the wall directly in front of me, that one had chairs to my right.

“Sorry, I don’t think it was. My room didn’t have a window, and the chairs were in a different spot. I think I might’ve been next door.”

Unmoving, she glares at me. “No, ma’am. This was your room.”

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