Page 131 of Secondhand Smoke

“Your dad’ll get it sorted.”

“Mags, I really don’t wanna talk about him right now.”

She sighed, but nodded. “Why don’t you come with me? No sense sitting around here and worrying.”

“I was glonna clock in.”

“After we get back,” she insisted. “Tonya’s in her second trimester and she’s got a doctor’s appointment today.”

It felt like someone shoved him, right in the middle of the chest.

“You ready to step up?” Maggie asked.

“I…” No more screwing around. No more being a worthless piece of shit. “Yeah,” he said on an exhale. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

~*~

He’d never been in this wing of the hospital before. When it came to his nephews, he hadn’t become involved until they’d arrived into the world, and the labor and delivery ward wasn’t the same as the OB/Gyn practice. Once he passed through the double doors at Maggie’s side, the hospital fell away, and in its place, a waiting room floored in wood-look tiles, with black and white photography prints on the walls, potted plants, soft lighting, and soothing jazz playing from hidden speakers.

He wanted to make a comment about wishing the rest of the place was this swanky, but there was a lump in his throat.

As if sensing his need for it, Maggie curled her arm around his, giving the impression he was the one supporting her, when the opposite was true. “She knows we’re coming,” she whispered. “It’ll be okay.”

When they reached the desk, Maggie leaned across it to explain their presence to one of the techs.

“Follow me, please,” the young woman said, and came around the desk to lead them through a door, down a hall lined with more black and white prints, to an interior waiting room, this one small and private.

Aidan spied a spread of maternity magazines on one of the coffee tables, alongside a display of brochures with a cartoon uterus on the front.

“You wanna sit?” Maggie asked.

“Not really.”

Maggie sat, jean-clad legs crossing. “I know it doesn’t seem like it right now. Right now, this seems like this huge big mess. But I can say with one-hundred percent confidence that you won’t regret keeping your baby.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You never wanted to leave Ava outside the firehouse?”

“Ass. You know I love my baby. I love you. Just like you’ll love yours. But even if–” She couldn’t make herself say it, the idea of him not loving his child too terrible to contemplate. “You would regret giving it up,” she said firmly. “I know you, and you’d hate yourself every day for it.”

Aidan heard the clip of shoes approaching them across the tiles and turned to look.

Tonya was starting to show a little. Not much, because she was lithe and fit, but her clinging shirt belied a slight curve to her belly. Beside her, her mother was the poster child for Elegant Older Ladies.

Maggie stood and came to stand beside him, taking his hand in her warm, strong one. “How’d the appointment go?” she asked in a businesslike voice.

In a matching tone, Tonya’s mother said, “It went well. She and the baby are perfectly healthy.”

A mom-to-mom stare-down of neutral expressions and guarded gazes ensued.

Tonya had a little paper rectangle in her hands. Another photo of some sort, Aidan realized.

“What’s that?” he asked, surprised he was able to get the words out.

She extended it toward him. “It’s for you,” she said in a flat voice. Apparently, he’d knocked all the fight out of her the last time he’d seen her. “You can keep it. It’s the baby.”

A startlingly clear image of the baby this time, no longer a blob, but a life, in unquestionable detail.

“Congratulations,” Tonya said. “It’s a girl.”

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