Before Brooke left for her dinner shift at Sea to Shore, her cell phone buzzed. She glanced at the text message, having guessed correctly that it was from Natalie. Over the past month, since the day of their argument in Natalie’s kitchen, her sister had left messages and sent her multiple texts, begging Brooke to please call her. “I’m so sorry,” Natalie said in her last voicemail. “I can only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Please. Can we just talk?”
Too little, too late, Brooke thought as she climbed into her car and began her short drive to work. She was doing well at her new job. Nick was happy with how quickly she’d caught on to the way the restaurant functioned, and her fellow employees seemed to like her.
Ryan had sent her a few texts as well. “I’m not just going to disappear,” he told her, and even though she didn’t respond, she didn’t block his number, either. If she had, he might simply show up at her apartment again, and she wasn’t sure how she’d handle that. After what had happened with Natalie, Brooke was less inclined than ever to take Ryan up on his offer of help. Other than her baby, she wasn’t going to let anyone close to her, ever again. Still, she thought about Natalie every time she delivered a beautiful dessert to one of her tables at work, but she decided it would be easier at this point if she pretended that she never had a sister at all.
Today, once she parked and entered the restaurant through the back door, Brooke punched in, then went to the bathroom to check her appearance and scrub her hands. She had purchased several work-appropriate outfits at a local thrift store, making sure all of her skirts had elastic waistbands and her tops were loose and comfortable. She wore her curls up in a twist with a few black tendrils down around her face and bought several pairs of supportive shoes so her back wouldn’t hurt so much at the end of her shift. According to the obstetrician at the clinic, her pregnancy was progressing well, but she still hadn’t found out the sex of the baby.
Now that she was twenty-three weeks, the biggest struggle she faced was how to hide her pregnancy under empire-waist tops. Nick hadn’t mentioned it, so Brooke decided to wait until closer to her due date to discuss the short maternity leave she would need to take. Until then, she would focus on being indispensable and saving up as much money as she possibly could. She’d been right about the flow of tips—on her weekend shifts, she was making up to five hundred dollars a night. Over the holidays, the restaurant had been so busy, Brooke couldn’t believe the amount of money she was bringing home. For the first time in her life, Brooke felt truly competent, grateful to be compensated so generously for the work she was doing. She decided she’d stay in her tiny apartment until the final weeks before the baby came, but she had begun looking on Craigslist for rental houses.
Now, Brooke made her way into the dining room to join the rest of the staff at a table so the chef could describe and let them taste the specials they would be serving that evening. A little while later, she took her first table of the night, a six-top that immediately ordered several cocktails, then asked to speak to the sommelier for assistance with picking out wines to accompany their meal. After putting in the order for their appetizers, Brooke found herself wondering if Natalie had already gone to meet their mother in Mt. Vernon; she imagined the two of them sitting together, clucking about how unfortunate it was that Brooke was too dysfunctional to forgive them both. The thought of this made her feel a little bit dizzy. In fact, she had to grab the edge of the counter by the pass to the kitchen to keep from stumbling.
“You okay?” another server, named Frank, asked. He was a bit older than Brooke, had been working at Sea to Shore for over ten years, and was responsible for training new employees like her.
“Yeah,” she said, trying to shake off the feeling. She wondered if she hadn’t eaten enough that day. She grabbed a roll from the warmer under the counter and took a bite. “Just hungry, I think,” she said to Frank, who nodded, lifted his diners’ plates from the window, and carried them out to the floor.
Brooke washed down the roll with a glass of water just as the hostess approached her and said that she had seated two more tables in her section. “Going to be a busy night,” the younger woman added. “Two hundred reservations on the books.”
“Wow,” Brooke said, still waiting for the food she’d eaten to make her feel better. As she made her way out to her section, she walked as straight as she could. She couldn’t get sick now, she thought. She needed to show Nick that he could count on her, no matter what.
She smiled at her new customers as best she could as she welcomed them and took their cocktail orders. Weaving her way through the tables back to the servers’ station, she quickly punched in their drinks and then grabbed her first table’s drink orders from the bar and set them on a large tray. She hiked it up on her right shoulder and carried a tray jack in her left hand, carefully balancing both. Beads of sweat popped out on her forehead, but with her hands full, she couldn’t wipe them away.
She was halfway across the restaurant, back toward the six-top, when a sharp spike of pain shot through her abdomen and down her leg, causing her knees to buckle. She fell hard onto the wood floor, and the tray she carried went flying. Luckily, there were no customers seated nearby.
“Oh, god,” she grunted as her muscles continued to spasm. A second later, she felt a rush of something liquid between her legs. Was her water breaking? Brooke thought in a panic. Was the baby coming early? She curled fetal on the floor, bringing her knees up to her chest, waiting for the pain to pass.
“Brooke!” she heard Nick say. “Are you all right? What happened?”
She shook her head, too scared to speak. The pain was excruciating, shooting through her belly into her hips. She was terrified to move, for fear of making things worse.
“Did you trip?” he asked, and again she shook her head, then spoke, her voice wound tight.
“I’m pregnant,” she gasped. “Something is wrong.”
“Call 911,” Nick directed, though to whom, Brooke didn’t know. She couldn’t open her eyes. All she could think about was her baby.
Nick rested a hand on her back. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Just stay still. Help is on its way.”
She nodded as the pain in her uterus squeezed again, and she felt as though she might be sick. She wanted to know if she was bleeding or if her water had broken, but she was in too much agony to check. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Nick. “I meant to tell you . . .”
“Hey,” Nick said. “It’s okay. I thought you might be, but I didn’t want to be the asshole who asks and gets punched in the face for being wrong.” He paused. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Brooke finally managed to crack open her eyes, only to see a circle of employees and customers with concerned looks on their faces. But she didn’t have time to be embarrassed, with only a few words running through her head: Please, God. Let my baby be okay.
The paramedics came ten minutes later, pushing all the other people away. Before Brooke knew it, they had lifted her onto the gurney and she was wheeled out of the building and slid into the back of an ambulance. They checked her vitals, and she told them how far along she was. “I think I might be bleeding,” she said, unable to fight back her tears. “Or my water broke. I’m not sure.”
“Okay,” the medic who had stayed in the back with her said. She was a blond woman who looked to be in her late twenties. “I’m going to check on that, then. Is that all right?”
Brooke’s jaw and bottom lip quivered, but she bobbed her head. The medic lifted the blanket they’d placed over her in the restaurant and gently pushed Brooke’s thighs apart. When she returned her brown eyes to Brooke’s, they were unreadable. “There’s some blood,” the medic said.
“Oh, god!” Brooke cried out, rolling her head to one side, unable to look at the medic a moment longer. She was losing this baby . . . just like she’d lost everyone else. Her tears came in earnest then, and painful, heavy sobs took her over. The ache in her uterus hadn’t gone away.
The medic placed a reassuring hand on Brooke’s arm. “Hold on now. That could mean any number of things. Let’s get you to the ER and the doctors will figure out exactly what’s going on. No matter what, they’ll take care of you, I promise. They’ll do everything they can.”
Brooke was crying too hard to respond. The medic held Brooke’s hand as she spoke over a radio to the ER, describing Brooke’s symptoms. When they wheeled her through the automatic sliding glass doors, Brooke was rushed into an exam room, where the medics left her and two nurses took over.
“I’m Gemma,” the older one with silver hair said. “And this is Mark.” She gestured to the short, stocky bald man in blue scrubs who was setting up an IV. “We’ll be taking care of you today. I understand that you’re pregnant?”
“Twenty-three weeks,” Brooke said, trying to ignore the biting ache in her gut. “Am I going to lose it?” Her voice shook, and she pressed a hand across her mouth to keep the sobs from taking back over.
“I don’t know,” Gemma said. “We have to run some blood tests and do an ultrasound before we know for sure what’s going on.”
“We’ll get you started on fluids and check for a fetal heartbeat,” Mark said. “The obstetrician is on her way.”
“Is there anyone we can call for you?” Gemma asked. “The baby’s father?”
Brooke dropped her hand back to her abdomen and considered what would happen if she asked the nurse to contact Ryan. So far, he’d done as she’d asked and stayed away, and she didn’t want to call him now and make him think she’d changed her mind about accepting his help.
“He’s not involved,” Brooke said, rubbing her hand over the pain in her belly. Her hip joints ached like nothing she’d ever felt before.
“Anyone else?” Mark said. “Your mother, maybe, or a friend?”
“No,” Brooke said, her eyes filling again. She realized that the one person she wanted to be there was Natalie. She knew her sister would hold her hand; she would push her hair back from her face and tell her everything was going to be okay.
“All right,” Gemma said, and several minutes later, the door swung open and to Brooke’s surprise, Natalie rushed into the room.
“Your manager called me. You listed me as your emergency contact on your application,” she said, answering the question she likely saw on Brooke’s face. Natalie’s cheeks were red and she was breathing fast. “I came right away.”
“And you are?” Mark asked, poising his fingers over the keyboard attached to the computer next to the bed.
“She’s my sister,” Brooke said, and then Natalie stepped over and grabbed her hand, the two of them waiting for the doctor to come.
• • •
“There we go,” Dr. Patel said as she pushed the ultrasound wand along Brooke’s belly and the familiar, comforting whoosh, whoosh of the baby’s heartbeat filled the room.
“Oh, thank god,” Brooke said through her tears. Natalie still held her hand and now gave it a hard squeeze. “What happened? Where did the pain come from? Why was I bleeding?”
“My guess is the pain was from your ligaments stretching and your hips beginning to expand. For some women, especially first-time mothers, this can hurt quite a lot.” Dr. Patel, an attractive East Indian woman who spoke with a musical lilt, kept her eyes on the screen as she continued to move the wand on Brooke’s stomach.
“What about the bleeding?” Natalie asked.
“It wasn’t much,” Dr. Patel said, “even though I’m sure it felt like it was. We don’t always know what causes it. Possibly too much exertion, or it could be for no real reason at all. The good news is that it stopped, and it didn’t contain any kind of tissue. The baby looks wonderful.” She finally glanced back at Brooke. “How’s your pain?”
Brooke shifted a bit in the hospital bed, trying to gauge her answer. “I’m still a bit achy, but the shooting pains went away.” Her baby looked wonderful, she thought.
“Excellent,” Dr. Patel said. “We’d like to keep you overnight, just to monitor both you and the baby. If all remains well, you can go home tomorrow.”
“But everything is still okay, right?” Brooke asked, anxiously. “The baby’s fine?”
“Yes,” Dr. Patel said. “She looks perfect.”
“She?” Brooke froze. “I’m having a girl?”
“You’re having a girl!” Natalie said, and her brown eyes lit up.
“My apologies,” Dr. Patel said. “I assumed you already knew. I do hope you didn’t want it to be a surprise.”
“No,” Brooke said, and a happy, fluttering feeling filled her chest. “It’s fine. I wanted to know.” She looked at Natalie, unable to deny that she was thrilled to have her sister with her as she received this news.
Dr. Patel stood. “The nurse will be back in a bit to finish the admit process, and I’ll update your regular obstetrician. Congratulations!”
Brooke thanked her, and after she’d left, Natalie finally let go of her sister’s hand and sat down in the chair next to the bed. They were both quiet, not looking at each other. Brooke wasn’t sure that she forgave Natalie completely, but she did know that she’d never been as happy to see anyone in her life as she was when her sister showed up. That had to count for something.
The only sounds in the room were the steady beeps coming from the monitors to which Brooke was attached. She wished she knew exactly what to say, how to express the crazy mix of emotions rushing through her. Foremost she was relieved, but she also felt wary, unsure of how to navigate a conversation about finding the background check in her sister’s kitchen that day. But having met Natalie, having spent just a few precious weeks with her, Brooke knew she needed to find a way to work things out—she couldn’t deprive her daughter of the same thing Brooke had been denied. She couldn’t allow a single argument to ruin the one chance at having a family she’d ever had.
“Thanks for coming,” Brooke finally said, in a soft voice. She looked at her sister, searching her face for some clue to whether Natalie was here out of a sense of duty or because she truly wanted to come.
“I thought you’d be pissed,” Natalie said, and the tension in her face visibly relaxed.
“But you came anyway.” Brooke paused, and gave her sister a wry smile. “We’re both stubborn. So there’s that.”
Natalie’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry, Brooke. I can’t apologize enough for hurting you. I never meant—”
“It’s okay,” Brooke said, holding up her hand to stop Natalie from saying more. “I get it. Kyle ran the report without telling you, and I understand why he did. If I was him, I probably would have done the same thing. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Natalie eyed her for a moment, looking as though she were trying to decipher whether or not to take Brooke at her word. “Okay,” she said.
And then Brooke asked the question that had been in the back of her mind since the last day they’d seen each other. The day she’d given Natalie the box filled with the details of their birth mother’s life. “Have you seen her yet?”
The look on Natalie’s face told Brooke her sister knew to whom she referred, and Natalie shook her head.
Brooke’s eyebrows both rose. “Why not?”
“I’m not sure. I guess I’m afraid.”
“That she’ll reject you?” Brooke asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper. This was another reason why Brooke had stayed in her car when she drove to her mother’s clinic—she could never work up the courage to face the possibility that the mother who had let her go over three decades ago would simply turn her away.
“Yeah. I think that’s probably it.”
“Me, too,” Brooke admitted. And then she spoke again, before she could change her mind. “Maybe it would be easier if we saw her together.”
Natalie looked at her. “Really? Are you sure?”
“No,” Brooke said, wondering if she would regret what she’d just offered to do. “But it has to be better than either one of us going alone.”
