by Brenda Novak
“What is it?” Apparently, Kyle had been able to tell that his words hadn’t been interpreted the way they’d been intended.
“Derrick says I’m allowing my insecurities to ruin our relationship.”
“Because he knows he’s losing you and he’s feeling panicked. That doesn’t mean what he says is true.”
“Do you think that’s it? Or could what we’re going through be more my fault than I realize? I’m not in a position of strength right now. I feel hurt. It seems to me that he’s part of the problem, not someone I’m taking out my hurt and anger on. But perhaps I’m not the best judge.”
Kyle studied her for several seconds. “It might be time to hire someone.”
“Hire someone?” she echoed.
“A private investigator.”
She brought a hand to her chest. “You’re suggesting I have someone spy on him?”
“Your doubts are driving you nuts. Maybe a private investigator will be able to put your fears to rest so you can move ahead with confidence—get married, like you planned.”
And maybe a private investigator would do the exact opposite.
But wouldn’t it be better to know, once and for all? To stop second-guessing?
Her heart began to race. “Checking up on him feels creepy. I don’t want to be the type of partner who’d resort to that.”
“He’s acting so shady I’m not sure you have any choice. You told me he’d never admit that he was cheating.”
He wouldn’t. Not unless he planned to leave her for Crystal and, at this point, she doubted he’d be confident enough of someone that young. He wouldn’t want to end up without either one of them. Derrick had to have a love interest at all times; he hated being alone. “If he prefers her, he’ll have to tell me eventually.”
“He has to know what he has in you. If he’s cheating, he’s not looking for someone new. He’s having a little fun on the side.”
She could imagine Derrick justifying sex with Crystal by telling himself it didn’t mean anything on an emotional level, and that made Lourdes sick. “Having his cake and eating it, too, as the cliché goes.”
Kyle shrugged. “I’m not trying to lead you to any particular conclusion. We don’t know for sure.”
“But we could find out, if I hire someone.”
“It’s a possibility, if the person you hire is any good.”
Suddenly a bit shaky, she steadied herself by gripping the counter. “I’ll think about it.”
They carried the food to the table. But before they sat down to eat, she insisted on seeing the tree, since he’d been so excited about showing it to her. “It’s beautiful. You did a great job.”
Obviously proud of his efforts, he rested his hands loosely on his hips. “Thanks. It’s all ready for you to finish,” he joked.
“Sure, I’ll finish—as long as it goes with me when I move to the farmhouse,” she said.
He gave her a mock scowl. “Don’t tell me we’re going to have a custody battle over our tree!”
She smiled. Not only was he handsome, he was charming, too. Her own father must’ve been like Kyle when her mother met him—committed to the small town where he’d grown up, assured of what he wanted in life, happier away from the limelight. Otherwise, why would Renate have let him derail her dreams? “We’re not going to have a battle unless you fight me for it.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Not when it means more to you. But—” he made a clicking sound with his tongue “—I’m not looking forward to moving it. I’m hoping you’ll change your mind.”
“Good point. On second thought, I don’t think I’m that dedicated to taking it with me.”
“I love a reasonable woman.” With a wink, he started back to the kitchen, but she caught his arm.
“I want to go ahead and...” She swallowed when he turned to look at her. She had such a visceral reaction to being this close to him, and it always caught her off guard. How could she feel such a strong awareness of another man when she was so upset about what was going on with Derrick?
“And...” he prompted.
“Hire a private investigator.”
His eyebrows drew together. “It might cost a couple grand. You should be warned about the price up front.”
She nodded to acknowledge that she understood. “It’ll be worth it. I have to find out if the doubts I’m feeling have any basis in truth.”
* * *
Callie went into labor that night. Kyle got the call as they finished dinner and he and Lourdes were deciding which movie they wanted to watch. After the hangovers they’d had this morning, they definitely didn’t plan to do any more drinking.
“But...isn’t it too soon?” he said to Levi, who was calling him on Bluetooth as he rushed his wife to the hospital.
Lourdes stopped clearing away the dishes.
“She’s thirty-six weeks,” Levi told him. “That’s...not as bad as it could be.”
Not as bad as it could be wasn’t exactly the reassurance Kyle had been hoping for. The anxiety in Levi’s voice made his own anxiety worse. “Right. Thirty-six weeks is...good,” he said, even though he’d heard Callie mention that a full-term pregnancy lasted forty. One month. How much difference could one month make?
When it came to creating a baby, surely four weeks could mean a lot...
“Can you call everyone else?” Levi asked. “I need to concentrate on...on her.”
And battle his fear... “Right. Of course. I’ve got it. You just get her to the hospital and we’ll be there soon.”
“What is it?” Lourdes asked as he pressed the end button on his phone.
He remembered Callie as he’d seen her at Black Gold, trying to get comfortable in her chair. “One of my closest friends is having her baby.”
“Everything should be okay,” Lourdes said, obviously reading the expression on his face for the concern that it was. “Granted, a baby who comes four weeks early isn’t in an ideal situation, but has an excellent chance of surviving.”
He experienced such an upwelling of emotion it almost brought tears to his eyes. His mother had died in childbirth, and she’d gone into the delivery room with no known health problems. “I’m not worried about the baby,” he said. “At least...not as worried as I am about the mother.”
“You said yourself that...embolism thing doesn’t happen often.”
“It doesn’t. But Callie nearly died when her liver failed a few years ago,” he explained. “At the last minute, they were able to find her a donor and do a transplant, and she’s been doing well since. But she’s on a lot of immunosuppressant drugs, which makes her more susceptible to infection and illness. Having a baby when her health is already so precarious is...tempting fate, in my opinion. If she was my wife, I never would’ve agreed to it.”
Lourdes moved the last of the dishes to the sink. “I’m sorry she’s had it so rough. What caused her liver to fail?”
“She had nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. And don’t ask me what causes that, because no one seems to know.”
“Was the pregnancy an accident, then? Unexpected?”
“No. Her doctor told her that a planned pregnancy for someone in her situation was relatively common. There are added risks, of course, but she was willing to take those risks so she and Levi could start a family.” He found his coat.
She moved her guitar and sat down on the couch. She hadn’t played it since she’d come to his house, but he noticed that she always kept it close. “There’s always adoption.”
“He says he was open to that. She wanted at least one natural child.”
“So maybe he had to go along with it, to keep her happy. I could see a guy doing that for a woman who’s been through so much.”
The memory of when he’d been at the hospital, w
aiting to learn if Callie would survive the transplant, was indelibly etched on Kyle’s mind as one of the longest, most nerve-racking days of his life. “But he could lose her. We all could.”
She pulled her guitar into her lap and rested her arm over it. “I hope it doesn’t go that way.”
“So do I.” Kyle searched for his keys and discovered them on the counter. “I’ve got to go to the hospital. Will you be okay here alone?” She’d been planning to stay alone while she was in Whiskey Creek anyway, but it still felt odd to be rushing off and leaving her behind, in his house, when they’d been about to spend the evening together.
“Of course.”
He was already dialing Dylan and Cheyenne, to begin the process of alerting everyone else in their group, when she caught him at the door.
“Will you text me?” she asked. “Let me know how it’s going? That may seem like an odd request, since Callie’s a total stranger to me, but I can’t help being concerned.”
Dylan had answered Kyle’s call by then, so Kyle merely nodded and hurried out.
* * *
Hour after hour dragged by. The updates Lourdes received from Kyle were few and far between, since he had to step outside the hospital to get his message to go through. But he didn’t have much to report, anyway. Lourdes knew Callie wasn’t having a Cesarean. The doctors felt she’d have a better chance delivering naturally. But that was the extent of her information.
She tried to distract herself from the temptation to call Derrick by researching the complications Kyle’s friend might face. According to one site on the internet, 40 percent of infants born to women who’d had a liver or kidney transplant were premature, so it was probably fortunate that Callie’s pregnancy had lasted as long as it did. Four weeks wasn’t as early as it could’ve been.
Callie was still looking at a whole list of dangers, however—high blood pressure, kidney infection, preeclampsia and cholestasis, to name a few. The baby faced its fair share of peril, too—stunted growth, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, various infections and immune deficiencies, even birth defects. To make the situation even less certain, there hadn’t been sufficient testing to determine the effects that some of the newer antirejection drugs might have on an infant. Lourdes couldn’t even guess what Callie had been taking, of course. It could be corticosteroids, cyclosporine, azathioprine, tacrolimus or a whole host of others she saw listed on various websites. But Callie was likely on several. Everything Lourdes read suggested someone in Callie’s situation would have to be, and Kyle had said as much, too.
Lourdes could understand why he was worried. She was worried for Callie, too. But reading about childbirth was making her uncomfortable for other reasons. She was fairly certain she wanted to be a mother someday, but she couldn’t really see that happening if she stayed on her current course. Derrick didn’t seem particularly interested in raising kids. He never talked about it and put her off if she brought it up. She felt that at forty he should be more interested if he was ever going to be interested. They were both too involved in the constant challenges of the music business. Chasing success was like an all-consuming drug, so all-consuming that when she was in Nashville, it was easy to feel nothing else mattered.
Here in Whiskey Creek, however, she had to ask herself if chasing her dream meant she’d miss out on another important aspect of life.
Stop, she told herself. Even if she and Derrick could get past their current problems, she couldn’t have a child anytime soon. Her career would be completely dead if she had to pull away for even a few extra months—and trying to resuscitate it afterward would be almost as hard as starting over. How would she juggle those long days and late nights with a new baby?
She went to the couch and strummed her guitar, but she couldn’t shake the idea that she was standing on the verge of taking one of two very different paths. That reminded her of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” She could still recite some of it. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...”
Could the downturn in her career be a wake-up call? she wondered. A chance to stand back and reassess, to decide whether she really wanted to exchange fame and fortune for everything else?
Her phone rang. Once she reclaimed it from the dining table, she saw that it was Derrick—and silenced it. But when he called back again and again, she finally slid the answer button to the right.
“What do you want?” she snapped. Her uncertainty about him—about so many aspects of her life—left her unprepared to talk to him.
“Don’t be mad. Come on. I miss you, babe. You can’t be serious about Crystal. She has nothing on you.”
He’d been drinking. She could hear it in the way he slurred his words. “Mad? That’s what you think? That I’m mad, and when I calm down it’ll all go away?”
“That’s what I’m hoping. You must be on the rag to be so bitchy.”
She almost couldn’t believe her ears. “Could you be any more dismissive of my feelings and concerns? Any more disrespectful to women in general?”
“I wouldn’t suggest it if it wasn’t true. You get like this when it’s that time of the month.”
“No, I don’t,” she argued, getting up to pace. “I’m having a legitimate problem with the attention you’re devoting to Crystal, and I’ve had that problem for months. How dare you blame it on my hormones!”
“It’s jealousy, plain and simple!”
“In addition to feeling as if I’m being misled!”
“Women!” he cried. “You’re all the same. Do you have to be so damn insecure?”
Lourdes gripped the phone tighter. She’d had enough of their arguing, but the cavalier way he was acting now incensed her again. “If you’re saying that your ex-wife behaved in the same way, she had good reason, remember? You cheated on her—and I’m guessing more than the one time you admitted to me.”
“Because she didn’t make me happy.”
“Then you should’ve left her!”
“I should never have told you what happened,” he said. “I knew you’d throw it up to me one day.”
“Was that the only time?”
“There were a couple of others, but that was after our marriage fell apart. There was no saving it. I didn’t even want to.”
“So, yes, you cheated multiple times.” She pivoted at the far end of the room. “Don’t you dare act as if I’m the one in the wrong!”
“I shared something I wouldn’t tell just anyone. I’m asking you to cut me a break, that’s all.”
Was she being insensitive and unreasonable? A shrew for raising the past?
Resisting the urge to continue the fight, she curled her fingernails into her palms. “I just want the truth, Derrick,” she said calmly, evenly, as she paused at the dining table. “If we’re going to continue, there has to be honesty between us.”
“I’m not in love with Crystal!”
Again, Lourdes forced back the emotion that came rushing to the forefront of her mind—and her mouth. “That’s not necessarily the issue. I’m asking if you’ve ever had sex with her. A simple yes or no will do.”
The silence that followed lasted a long time—and the longer it stretched out, the more chilled Lourdes became. He had something to say.
“Derrick?” she said, her voice a plea. “Tell me the truth. Please. Have you ever been with her?”
“Damn it, Lourdes. Why do you have to keep pushing? Yes, we were together once, okay? Are you happy now? It didn’t mean anything! We were working late one night and...and we got carried away. I would’ve told you, but I knew you’d make a much bigger deal out of it than it has to be.”
Lourdes’s whole body had gone weak at yes. She hardly had the strength to remain on her feet and keep the phone to her ear. She could hear Derrick talking—pleading and cajoling and apologizing. There was at least one “I love you” in there
. He kept pausing, obviously expecting her to react, but she couldn’t drag a single word to her lips. A loud voice sounded in her head, over and over, like a blaring horn. He just admitted it! He just admitted it! You were right all along!
“Lourdes? You still there? You gotta believe me, babe. It was stupid and...and mechanical. It meant nothing. I swear.”
Light-headed, Lourdes lurched back to the couch, leaning on all the furniture in between for support. Then she sank down and put her head between her knees.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he asked. “Go ahead. Yell. I deserve it. Just know that...that it wasn’t your fault. And it has no bearing on how I feel about you.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Breathe.
“Honey? Don’t take it too hard. Please! I wanted to tell you from the beginning. You have to believe me on that. But you’ve been so touchy about Crystal. And you’ve been dealing with...such terrible setbacks in your career. I didn’t want to add to that.”
Then why had he? Apparently, she’d been trying to cope with those setbacks while he’d been off banging his new client.
“I always planned to tell you—later. I didn’t think this was a good time,” he was saying when she tuned in again.
“When would be a better time?” she asked breathlessly. “After we were married?”
“There was no rush. We haven’t even set a date.”
“Because of this.”
He went silent.
As Lourdes sat up, her dinner threatened to come up, too. She barely managed to hold everything down. But some masochistic need to ferret out all the details took over. “How many times?”
“Once. Just once.”
Like he’d first claimed with his wife? “When?”
“A month ago. And it hasn’t happened since.”
The tears burning in her eyes began to roll down her cheeks. She sniffed, trying to hold them back.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “I hate myself for this.”
She dashed a hand across her cheek. “So why won’t you ask her to find another manager?”
