His Miracle Baby

by Karen Sandler

  Logan’s hand went immediately to her belly. “Where?”

  She laughed and covered his hand with hers. “It’s probably too early for you to feel. It feels almost like gas, like a tickling inside.”

  Still, he kept his hand against her, his other arm wrapped around her shoulders. “Arianna never kept her pregnancy long enough for me to feel the baby move.”

  “I know.”

  He stroked her rounded abdomen, his breath curling in her ear as he said softly, “Thank you, Shani.”

  If she let her imagination run wild, she could hear “I love you” in his whispered words. But that kind of fantasy would only be courting heartbreak. Instead, she’d savor this moment of happiness, build on it what she could, repressing her longings for the impossible.

  This wasn’t Logan’s first business trip in the six weeks since they’d married, but the first one encompassing the weekend. During the week, Shani had so much to keep her busy, she had less time to dwell on missing Logan, and was tired enough at night she’d fall asleep quickly.

  After a long workday and an hour on the phone with Logan, she slept well enough on Friday night. On Saturday, she took a good, long walk around the neighborhood, shadowed by Patrick Cade’s man, then lay down for a nap. She slept longer than she’d intended, waking with her lower back sore from the unaccustomed exercise.

  She discovered after her nap that she’d missed Logan’s phone call. She couldn’t reach him all afternoon, his cell no doubt switched off during his presentation at the conference. They weren’t able to touch base until seven, and he kept his call short because she’d just sat down to dinner. She tried him again at nine, but yawned her way through their conversation, exhaustion weighing on her. Yet when she climbed into bed, her aching back and too much sleep in the afternoon kept her wakeful until past two.

  She woke the next morning feeling tired and cranky, the ache in her back exacerbated from sleeping awkwardly. She had little appetite for the breakfast Mrs. Singh fixed for her, the housekeeper’s usually delicious blueberry muffins unappealing. At eleven-thirty, she dozed off at the desk in the master bedroom as she struggled to craft an essay for her employment law class.

  Shutting the laptop, she stumbled to the bed and dropped into it, asleep almost instantly. She had strange, disjointed dreams and struggled to awareness several times before she could finally wake herself.

  She lay there, muzzy and disoriented, squinting at the clock. The time shocked her—nearly one. She couldn’t believe she’d slept so long. She felt even more out of sorts than before her nap, unhappy that Logan wasn’t expected home for another three hours.

  She pushed herself vertical, then dropped her feet to the floor. Her lower back throbbed in uneasy warning. As she pushed to her feet, excruciating pain stabbed the base of her spine. At the same moment, she felt wetness between her legs.

  “No,” she moaned.

  The pain intensified, doubling her over. She forced herself to the bedroom door, her ears roaring from the agony. Every muscle trembling, Shani reached the railing of the landing and leaned over it.

  Please, God, let Mrs. Singh be nearby. She vaguely remembered the housekeeper mentioning she had to do the week’s marketing today. Shani prayed she hadn’t left yet.

  “Mrs. Singh!” she called downstairs as loudly as she could. No answer. She yelled again, gasping as another shaft of agony shot down her leg.

  Trying to breathe through the pain, she remembered the phone back in the bedroom. She turned to call 911 herself, but another lance of pain stole the strength from her legs. She sank to the floor, tears filling her eyes.

  She dragged in breath after breath, willing herself to stand again. She felt another trickle of wetness, and despair filled her.

  “Mrs. Singh!” she screamed out, but the silent house told Shani the housekeeper was gone. Tears flooded her cheeks as she gripped the baluster. She had to get herself into the bedroom, to a phone.

  The rattle of a door lock caught her attention and her heart lifted in sudden relief. “Mrs. Singh?”

  “Shani?” Logan’s voice called out.

  “Upstairs! Logan, I need you.”

  Logan took off at a dead run at Shani’s terrifying plea, racing from the kitchen, through the living room, up the stairs three at a time. Seeing her crumpled by the railing, his heart felt as if it would explode in his chest. Without conscious thought, he scooped her up and hurried back downstairs with her in his arms.

  “You weren’t getting home until four,” she said, her voice ragged.

  “Got on an earlier flight.” He pushed the garage door open and shouldered through. “I had to get home.”

  He set her gently in the Mercedes, then hit the garage door opener before running around to the driver’s side. The garage door had barely cleared the roof of the car before he backed out, the screeching of tires attracting the attention of Patrick Cade’s man, who’d just emerged from around the side of the house. Logan shouted out to the security guard, “Taking Shani to the hospital,” before gunning down the drive and out the gate.

  Each trip he’d taken away from Shani had been harder to bear, each one lonelier than the last. At the conference, he’d been preoccupied with Shani nearly every waking moment, stumbling more than once during his well-rehearsed workshop on innovation and marketing. When he’d phoned yesterday during her nap, Mrs. Singh had offered to wake Shani, but he knew she needed her rest. They played telephone tag the rest of the afternoon, and when they finally connected, their interaction was abbreviated and unsatisfying.

  Thank God he’d given in to his weakness and decided to return early. He’d given a keynote speech at an early-morning breakfast meeting and had promised to attend the luncheon before heading home. But once he’d completed his speech, he couldn’t stand to spend another moment in Phoenix. He called the airline to reschedule his flight and was on his way to Sky Harbor twenty minutes later.

  He glanced over at Shani, his stomach constricting at her pale face. “What’s going on?”

  “It hurts,” she said faintly. “My back. Down the back of my leg. And I felt something wet on my panties.”

  His mind immediately flew to the worst option. “Blood?”

  “I don’t know. I never got a chance to check. It hurt too much.”

  An icy chill shot down his spine. “Are you cramping?” That was how it had started with Arianna. Cramping, then bleeding, then…

  “Sharper pain,” Shani said.

  Thank God the hospital was only ten miles away in Folsom. No freeway route to get there, though, so it would take nearly twenty minutes, even pushing the speed limit along Auburn-Folsom Road. At every stoplight, he wanted to slam his fist into the horn to move the other cars out of the way.

  At Mercy Hospital, he arrowed into the first empty space he could find, then hurried around to Shani. He carried her in to the emergency entrance, praying for a miracle, struggling to hold hopelessness at bay.

  Spotting a wheelchair as he stepped inside, he gently set Shani down in it, then hurried over to one of the admitting clerks. “My wife is five months pregnant,” he told the middle-aged woman behind the counter. “She’s in pain. I think she might be…”

  He couldn’t say the word miscarrying out loud, but the clerk understood. “Let me call OB.” She picked up the phone and carried on a rapid-fire conversation.

  While they waited for the nurse, Logan started the paperwork process with the admitting clerk. He hadn’t quite finished when the nurse arrived, but the clerk waved him off to accompany Shani.

  He helped Shani undress, letting her clutch his hand when the pain was particularly bad. After getting Shani settled on the bed in her blue gown, the nurse strapped a fetal monitor around Shani’s waist. As they waited for the doctor, Shani looked so small, so frightened, a hole opened in Logan’s chest seeing her that way.

  “I need to tell you something.” She glanced up at him, her expression grave. “If I lose the baby—”

  “Don�
�t say it.” Saying it out loud might make it real.

  “But if I do…” She took in a long breath. “There’s no reason for us to be married anymore.”

  The air left his lungs; he couldn’t muster a response. Was the baby the only reason Shani stayed with him? Had he fooled himself into thinking there was more to their union than the child she carried? How could he blame her, when he couldn’t give her the one thing she’d asked for, valued above all else?

  Before they could continue the discussion, the doctor entered. “Mr. and Mrs. Rafferty, I’m Dr. Jack Hanford.”

  The doctor checked the readout on the fetal monitor. “No contractions. The baby’s heartbeat seems regular.” He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and positioned Shani’s legs up in stirrups.

  The doctor scooted his stool over to examine Shani. “The cervix is still in good shape. No effacement. Let’s check those vaginal secretions.”

  The man obtained a sample, then smeared a swab onto a glass slide. “Have to check this under the scope.”

  After he left the room, Logan bent to press a kiss to Shani’s forehead. “You’re going to be fine,” he murmured in her ear.

  A few moments later, Dr. Hanford returned. “Not amniotic fluid. Just normal vaginal discharge. That can get a little heavier with pregnancy.”

  Shani’s hand tightened around Logan’s fingers. “What about the pain?”

  “Any discomfort in the abdominal area?”

  Shani shifted on the bed, her discomfort clear. “No. Just my lower back and down the back of my leg.”

  Dr. Hanford pulled off his gloves. “Your pain is likely sciatica. Still not much fun, but not labor. Sciatica’s usually more of a problem later in pregnancy.”

  Logan was afraid to believe the good news. “She’s not miscarrying?”

  He shook his head. “Just to be safe, we’ll do an ultrasound to make sure the fluid level around the baby is normal. Assuming everything continues to check out, we’ll send you home with some Vicodin for the pain.”

  “Is that safe for the baby?” Shani asked.

  “Narcotics are actually a little safer than anti-inflammatories at this stage of the game.”

  With that pronouncement, Dr. Hanford strode from the room. Logan carefully gathered his wife in his arms, soaking up her tears as she cried quietly. When he straightened, his hand still linked in hers, she smiled up at him, her eyes red but her expression joyful.

  “It still hurts like the dickens,” she told him, the angles of her face sharp from the pain. “But I don’t even care. Just the thought that we might have lost him…”

  He smoothed her hair back, wishing he could draw the hurt from her body into his own. As grateful as he was that the baby was fine, that the threat of miscarriage had been a false alarm, he realized he had more reason than the baby’s health to rejoice.

  Shani wouldn’t be leaving him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The first Saturday in spring, Mrs. Singh went into a frenzy of cleaning, going through the main house like a sanitation tornado. While under strict orders from Logan to avoid any heavy lifting, Shani worked alongside the housekeeper, dusting as Mrs. Singh vacuumed, or scrubbing the windows she could reach without climbing on a ladder.

  Mrs. Singh appreciated the company and Shani enjoyed the work. She needed the break from the mental exercise of term papers and senior thesis, needed something that didn’t take any more brain power than what was required to squirt window cleaner on a pane of glass.

  Finished with the guest room Shani had once used and all the first-floor rooms, they’d made their way upstairs into the master bedroom. In preparation for dusting the massive mahogany dresser, Shani had shifted all the lightweight odds and ends from it to the desk Logan had moved from the guest room for her. With furniture polish on a soft rag, she buffed the top of the dresser as Mrs. Singh worked in the bathroom.

  Just as Shani gave a last swipe of her cloth on the dresser, the housekeeper exited the master bath with her bucket of cleaning supplies. She held out a paperback book to Shani. “I found this in the vanity, in a bottom drawer. Arianna must have left it there.”

  A romance novel, Shani saw from the cover. Arianna had loved them, their hopeful messages, their happy endings.

  Shani opened it to where a bookmark had been tucked inside. “Looks like this is as far as she got in the book.” Sadness tightened Shani’s throat at the reminder of an unfinished life.

  The slip of paper fluttered from the book to the floor. As Shani retrieved it, she noticed an e-mail address written on it, in Arianna’s flowing script. Shani didn’t recognize the address. She set the paper and the book on the nightstand.

  Mrs. Singh rolled in the vacuum from the hall, then leaned on the handle as Shani replaced the items on the dresser. “I’m glad things are working out well for you and Mr. Rafferty,” she said as she played out the cord for the vacuum. “That man deserves his happiness.”

  “Have you worked for Mr. Rafferty a long time?” Shani asked as she carefully positioned Arianna’s glass paperweight on Logan’s side of the dresser.

  “Since before he married the first Mrs. Rafferty. A friend of my mother’s worked for his father and recommended me.”

  Mrs. Singh started the vacuum, the noise precluding conversation for the moment. Nevertheless, the questions tumbled in Shani’s mind.

  How much might that friend have told Mrs. Singh about Logan’s childhood? What insight could the housekeeper give Shani about her husband to better understand him?

  In the nearly three months since their marriage, as her love for Logan grew, becoming almost too painful to keep inside, her longing to discover a way inside his heart had become a near obsession. She’d reread the diary, pored over each page where Logan was mentioned, scrutinizing each word for a clue. She’d gone back to the cottage, scouring the closet and dresser drawers, hoping to find the missing diary pages that might provide enlightenment.

  She still felt as in the dark about Logan as she had when she’d first reentered his life last summer. How could a man who could seem so caring be at the same time so aloof? His solicitousness after their emergency room scare had been so comforting. The three days she lay bedridden from the sciatica he’d jumped to fulfill her every need, and after the doctor gave her the all clear, his tenderness when they made love touched her to her very core. But even still, there was always a barrier between them, a wall she could never quite penetrate.

  Mrs. Singh shut off the vacuum and started wrapping the cord. Logan would be up here soon to turn the mattress. If Shani intended to interrogate Mrs. Singh, she’d better do it quickly.

  She set the polishing cloth down on the desk. “Do you know anything about him when he was younger?”

  Mrs. Singh rolled the vacuum over by the door. “Help me strip the bed so it’s ready for Mr. Rafferty.”

  Working opposite the housekeeper, Shani peeled away the comforter, then the other bedding. After they set the pillows on the side chairs and pulled off the fitted sheet and mattress pad, Mrs. Singh sat on the edge of the bed, gesturing to Shani to sit beside her.

  “My mother’s friend worked there the first few years after Mr. Rafferty’s mother died. She would tell my mother stories…” Mrs. Singh shook her head. “At the time, I was a new wife with my firstborn on the way, just like you.”

  Mrs. Singh didn’t know about Shani’s first son, but Shani kept her twinge of pain and its cause to herself. “What stories?”

  “This friend, Mrs. Patel, worked as housekeeper and nanny. Sometimes, she would return from her days off to find no one there watching the child. Mr. Rafferty’s father would leave him there alone.”

  Meeting Mrs. Singh’s dark gaze, Shani could see the housekeeper’s horror matched her own. “But he was only seven when his mother died.”

  Mrs. Singh nodded. “One day she arrived to discover the boy had fallen from a tree in the backyard and broken his arm. A neighbor heard him crying and took him to the doctor. It took hours to
find his father.”

  Shani couldn’t hold back tears of empathy for that poor scared boy. Mrs. Singh took her hand and patted it. “There were other stories.”

  “I don’t have to hear them.” What Mrs. Singh had revealed had been enough to clarify the path Logan had taken to become the man he was today. That he could be kind at all to her, that bitterness hadn’t eaten him up inside, was a miracle.

  At the sound of the front door slamming and footsteps up the stairs, Shani and Mrs. Singh both jumped to their feet, then looked at each other. They laughed like guilty children.

  Logan entered, Patrick Cade at his heels. The owner of the security firm had arrived this morning, substituting for one of his employees so the woman could celebrate her daughter’s first birthday. He and Logan had been outside all morning testing the security system.

  Patrick was at least a couple of inches taller than Logan’s six foot two, even broader in the shoulders, his close-cropped hair dark blond and his piercing eyes green. Polite and soft-spoken, he was even more taciturn than Logan, likely with just as many secrets.

  “I roped Patrick into giving me a hand with that mattress,” Logan said.

  Patrick nodded at Shani and Mrs. Singh as the two women backed away to give the men room. They muscled the king-size mattress up off the box springs as if it was featherlight, rotating it and flipping it to Mrs. Singh’s satisfaction.

  “Any other heavy work you need done before we go back outside?” Logan asked.

  “I think that’s it,” Shani said.

  Before they headed out, Logan surprised her, pulling her in his arms for a very thorough kiss. When he stepped away, Shani saw Mrs. Singh occupying herself with the mattress pad, but Patrick had his gaze fixed on them in frank observation, a faint smile on his face, one brow raised.

  Then the men were gone. Heat lingered in Shani’s face, but she felt too darn happy to be embarrassed.

  Mrs. Singh came around the bed and gave her a hug. “It’s good that he’s found someone to love again.”