Page 100 of Bar Down, Baby

“Right,” he says. He starts to walk away and then pauses. “I heard you’re expecting?”

“Yes, in December.”

“Congratulations. Is it a boy or a girl?”

I flinch, but I don’t think he notices. “We’re waiting to find out.”

He chuckles and shakes his head. “My wife never had the patience for that. Wanted to be able to visualize it, you know? Tried to tell me it was important to the mother to be able to picture the baby, that it’d make her back pain easier if she knew what she was working for.”

He may as well have just punched me in the nuts. I never considered what Megan was giving up by not finding out the sex. Shit.

“Alright, well, best of luck.” He nods at me as he takes a drink of his coffee.

“Thank you.”

He pats my shoulder, and then he leaves. I sit, draining the contents of my cup, watching leaves fall from the trees outside and pile up in the gutters. I don’t know what they think they’ve found, but it’s probably connected to me. And if they dig, even a little, everything could fall apart.

Before I can think about it too hard, I’ve bought another coffee and I’m walking back across campus, straight to my car. I need to take care of this before it’s too late.

CHAPTER37

MEGAN

“Please tellme the eggplant is in the peach box.” Bee’s giggle spills out of my speakerphone, and I can’t keep in the giggle either. I shift two boxes off the one containing the peach yarn and examine the contents.

“Nope. Nothing but peach in that box.”

“That would’ve been too perfect.”

“How did you lose a box full of eggplants? Also, how many eggplants can you fit in a box?”

Bee’s teasing brightens the otherwise frustrating task of searching for inventory that I’ve had to shift back down to my already cramped bedroom. Midge was apologetic when she told me she needed to have some work done on her apartment and I would need to get all my inventory out of there for a week, tops. It’s been ten days, and my system isn’t getting any better.

“More than you’d think,” I grumble as I eye a box beneath four others, tucked into the corner behind the stroller and portable bassinet.

“Can I please get that on a bumper sticker?” Bee laughs out loud.

“Knock yourself out,” I mumble, squatting at the knees to try to lift the boxes without toppling anything.

Yes, it would be safer for me to move everything one box at a time. But I’ve already been through every damn box. Except for this one, I realize. Because I was so certain it wasn’t the purple box. But now I need to access it. I lift, but something tweaks in my side and I gasp, toppling into the stroller, the boxes spilling out of my hands and knocking the phone off the bed and into a box of tissue paper.

“You okay, Meg?” Bee’s voice calls.

“Yeah,” I say, pushing off the stroller. But my back twinges and I groan as I rub at it. “Can I call you back?”

“Sure, but if you go into early labor, you better remember to put me on FaceTime. I want the good seats. And when I say, ‘good seats,’ I mean I want my face to be the first one that baby sees. I need to be able to imprint on him so he knows who he can call when he needs a getaway driver.”

“I’ll ask the doctor to put you front and center.”

I dig the phone out of the tissue paper box and end the call. I don’t know what I just did, but I really tweaked something in my back. It doesn’t help that my belly is throwing off my center of gravity and tugging on that same part of my back. Everything hurts more than it did yesterday and the day before that. My feet are swollen, my legs ache, and my breasts are tender.

I lean over the bed, trying to do a modified cat-cow stretch. But it pinches and I fall into the bed with a gasp. The door behind me opens as I reach back, trying to rub at it.

“What happened in here?” Derek is standing there.

Derek, who has been so busy with work that I haven’t seen in almost two weeks. Who only texts once a day or so to let me know he’s still alive.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, stuck on my forearms against the bed.

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