Page 30 of The Christmas Eve Delivery

I had to blink back tears. Right at that moment, she reminded me so much of my mother. Aunt Ruth hadn’t had a compassionate bone in her body. I forgot that people could be nurturing.

After I finished the soup, I excused myself back into my little apartment and left Mrs. Griffin to handle the front desk. I knew she could handle it.

My stomach felt somewhat settled. I headed back to my apartment with cautious optimism. It really wasn’t much of an apartment—two bedrooms, a common bathroom, and a small common room with a TV. On my dream list of renovations to the inn was a proper apartment, complete with a kitchen. As it was, my kitchen was on the opposite side of the lobby, and I treated the lobby as my private living room, where I could curl up in front of a fire and read. I knew it wasn’t typical, but it was home. Now it just seemed like an empty hotel suite. Something was missing.

Someone, not something. Miles was missing. Before I dissolved into a puddle of tears, I crawled back into bed and hugged the pillow that still smelled like him.

I must have fallen back asleep. I never took naps like this before. I really hoped I wasn’t getting sick. I couldn’t afford to get sick.

In the morning, I woke refreshed and felt perfectly healthy when my alarm went off. I got up to put out the pastries and start a fresh pot of coffee brewing. The smell hit me wrong and then next thing I knew, I was running for the bathroom.

I was going to have to see the doctor if this kept up. I didn’t have a stomachache, just all this annoying sickness. It took a while for my stomach to settle, but then I felt perfectly fine.

The Fondas, the couple who had checked in a few days earlier, were now standing in the lobby with their suitcases, ready to check out when I came back out front. The woman kept opening the pastries, smelling them, and then she would make a very unpleasant sound that I thought might inspire my stomach to revolt again.

She handed pastry after pastry to her husband. “I can’t eat this, you take it.”

He set the pastry down on the counter.

“Is there something wrong with the pastries?” I finally asked. I don’t think I would’ve been bothered if she had sat there and eaten everything in the basket, but she wasn’t eating anything. She was opening them and wasting them. Her husband wasn’t eating them either. I needed to know if they had gone bad or something.

“Everything smells bad to her right now. If she took a bite, she would realize they were perfectly fine,” he said.

“I can’t get past the smell. He’s right, everything smells absolutely disgusting,” she said.

Panic washed over me. Was there something in the inn that I couldn’t smell?

“There’s nothing here,” she said as she looked at me.

I didn’t have a good poker face. I must have had a very obviously concerned look on my face.

“I recently found out that I’m pregnant,” she said. “Everything smells horrible. At least I’m not throwing up every ten minutes.”

“Congratulations.”

She moaned unhappily.

“You can congratulate us after the baby is here. Her first few months of pregnancy are always miserable. She’s uncomfortable, she’s tired, and last time, she was constantly throwing up.”

“So you have kids at home?” I asked.

“This was our anniversary getaway. Our boys are home with my mother. She will be thrilled and think I got knocked up on vacation,” the wife said. “I’m probably a month or so along at this point. After all, there’s really no way of knowing until the body decides to make it known.”

“You haven’t taken a pregnancy test yet?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized it was a completely inappropriate question.

Fortunately, she didn’t seem to be bothered by my nosiness and shook her head.

“Not yet, but I don’t need one. I recognize all the symptoms.”

I finished checking them out and congratulated them again anyway as they left.

I thought about what the woman said about how she’d already been pregnant for a while before her symptoms really kicked in, and then she knew for certain. I couldn’t stop thinking about how she had described her symptoms.

Was there any way of knowing if that was what was going on with me? I wasn’t going to need to go to the doctor if I could go grab one of those cheap drugstore home tests. I needed to go shopping anyway, so why not add that to my list? If I took the test and it came out negative, I could tell the doctor I definitely wasn’t pregnant when I made an appointment because I kept throwing up.

The joke was on me that afternoon. I went shopping and purchased a pregnancy test, and after stressing about taking it for another few hours, I finally did. My expectation was that it would be negative. Except that two little purple lines indicating that I was definitely pregnant showed up.

I sat on my bed and stared at the positive results on the test stick. What the hell was I going to do now? I had no way of contacting Miles. He never did fill out the visitor registry completely the last time he was here. And he didn’t register at all this time. How was I supposed to contact him and let him know what was going on?

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