Page 44 of The Glass Dolphin

“Have you taken a test at home?” The young woman wrote something on her chart, but El couldn’t imagine what.

“No.” She glanced over to Aaron. “Everyone…I thought I’d like to do it privately.”

The young woman looked over to Aaron and visibly flinched. “Oh, of course.” She recovered quickly, a little laugh coming out of her mouth. “I have to admit, I didn’t even see you. You go a little face-blind when you work in a place like this.”

“I’ll bet,” Aaron said kindly.

She drew in a breath as she looked up. “Well, if we’re just testing, I can get you going on that. It only takes a few minutes, and if you want to see the doctor after that for vitamins or due dates or…” She trailed off, her eyes growing wider. “Let’s take the test first.”

“Yes,” El said. “We should probably do that first.” She left Aaron sitting in the room while she went with the nurse alone this time. She provided a sample, and she couldn’t believe that something she normally never thought about could hold the answer to something she desperately wanted.

“Ah,” she said to herself as she dried her hands. “So you do desperately want this.” Of course she did.

A child bonded a mother and a father into a family, and she’d be forever woven into the intricate tapestry of their shared existence, each thread imbued with laughter, tears, whispers of love, and moments of wonder.

She’d seen AJ and Matt and Asher. Theybelongedtogether.

Eloise wanted to become part of something greater than herself; she wanted to belong to a story being written with each beat of her heart, Aaron’s heart, and their baby’s tiny heart.

Exhaling, like she’d done all she could do for now, she left the bathroom and returned to Aaron. The nurse wasn’t there, and she found him frowning at his phone. “Work?” she asked.

“Yes,” he clipped out. “Councilman Hodges just reported a threatening letter.” He looked up and tucked his phone away, his face clearing quickly. “Done?”

“They’re testing,” she said as she sat. She’d dealt with a lot of up and down emotions since dating and then marrying Aaron. She knew how to worry about him and when to start letting go and trusting in his other officers, in his expertise, and in God. “A threatening letter?”

“Paul’s handling it,” Aaron said easily. “I’ll look at it tomorrow—or when he texts it to me.”

“Something about the building permits?” The same group that Weston Bent claimed he belonged to had been posting semi-threatening messages on social media, citing that “more will be coming” unless certain changes were made around the cove.

“Yes,” Aaron said, practically exhaling out the word. “We’re not even doing building permit approvals right now. They should be happy about that. They’ve basically gotten what they want.”

El nodded, though she didn’t quite agree. “The Council did approve over two hundred last year.”

“Those still have to go through the Building Permits office,” Aaron said. “And a building permit isn’t just issued willy nilly. It has to have an address assigned to it, and more than half of those were for residential houses, not retailer space.”

Eloise looked up. “They were? You didn’t say that.”

“Well, they were.” Aaron pressed his lips into a fine line. He’d been spread thin for the past several months, first with his father’s Cleaner, Safer Beach Initiative, and now with this. He’d been in a constant hiring loop, and El wanted to provide a slow, steady, safe place for him to come home to.

They rarely talked about his job at home, though he did bring up topics from time to time. When she’d learned of the vandalism, she’d asked him questions, because it was Maddy’s restaurant. He’d informed her five minutes before he’d gone on-air that he’d be doing so, and Eloise hadn’t appreciated that.

He didn’t like keeping secrets from her either, but he hadn’t wanted to put her in an awkward position with her friends.

“Like, hey, we’re adding a deck and need a building permit?” she asked. “Or permits for big subdivisions of condos and townhomes?”

“Both,” he said. “Everything is on the website. There are only three building sites in the cove right now, and they were approved prior to last year. They still need permits for various things from time to time. There’s notthatmany new houses going in.”

El watched his face flush slightly. “You think their argument isn’t valid.”

“I think the cove has to grow in order to survive,” he said, meeting her eye. “How can people not see that? We get swamped with tens of thousands of tourists every year. Who serves them in restaurants? Where do they buy groceries? How can we get them from island to island, and then around on each island? People who live here. We can’t force our full-time citizens out of the cove and expect to support our tourism in the summer.” He shook his head and looked down at his phone again. “Yeah, I think Weston Bent has his knickersbentthe wrong way.”

El smiled, because she actually liked it when her husband finally started talking. She could’ve guessed how Aaron felt about this topic, but now she didn’t need to. She owned an inn on Sanctuary Island, so of course she wanted all of the things he’d just said. She wanted the cove to run like a well-oiled machine, from the airlines who flew here, to the drivers working for RideShare, to the ferry operators who brought her travelers up to Cliffside.

She needed truck drivers to deliver food, and laundry services to keep her sheets and towels sparkling white. She wanted more tourism, not less, and she threaded her fingers through Aaron’s. “What is the outcome of this going to be?” Her stomach, which already clenched angrily at her, seemed to double down in its protest to her introducing a stressful topic.

“I honestly don’t know,” he said. “We can’t silence them. If they operate outside the law, then we use the law to punish. That’s all we can do.”

“So they can show up at tomorrow night’s meeting and picket.”

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