He had booked his flight so he could be back in time for the wedding.
“You honestly think I could stay away from this appointment?” Ryan had a late game last night—on the west coast.
“Have you slept?” I ask.
“On the plane. Have you?” he counters.
I don’t answer because I haven’t, and I promised him yesterday, via video chat before he went to the stadium, that I was going to take it easy. But worried about today, I couldn’t stay still, so when I received a call asking if I could fill in, I said yes. “I told you it’s not serious.”
He silences me with the tenderness in his eyes and the tuck of a stray piece of my blond hair behind my ear. There’s still a few streaks of black in my hair and a few streaks of red. Even though I’m a charge nurse for the ER, I’ve never fully embraced conventional.
“You need to sleep,” I say. “You’re the best man.”
Ryan has the most incredulous expression. “Who gets married during playoffs?”
I raise an eyebrow as I still don’t know how to explain that the sun doesn’t rise and set around baseball for the rest of the world as it does for him. “Did you hire a private plane?”
He shrugs.
I point at him. “You promised me normal. You became a big boy major league pitcher and you promised me normal. Private planes aren’t normal.”
“We can afford a few private flights, and if doing so gets me here in time to be with you when you need me, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
“I’m okay. The doctor said my bloodwork looked good. She said she just wants to take a look. This is what happens when I make friends. They do random things like being overly concerned.”
Ryan tucks my hair behind my ear again, not because anything is out of place, but because he’s out of place, because I’m out of place. We’re out of our element—off track. Leaning a little too left when we should be more right. There’s concern in his eyes, and that causes the anxiety in me to twist further.
“I don’t want you to feel scared or alone,” Ryan says.
“I don’t.” I do feel scared, but I love that I’m no longer alone.
I wrap my arms around myself because I am terrified. It took me a long time to get my head around jumping into this scenario, and one of the reasons I did agree to it is that since Ryan entered my life, he has always been by my side.
All through the up and downs of college, when Ryan and I lived in an old apartment and were two struggling students with crappy jobs. Yeah, my Uncle Scott was and is loaded, but to teach me responsibility, he paid for my college education while I paid for my rent and associated bills.
Ryan stayed by me when he was drafted into the minors by a team across the country after college, and I was about to begin my masters in nursing. Before he left, he got down on one knee, asked me to marry him and in one week we threw together a backyard wedding at Scott’s. The reception held near the old barn where we first kissed.
He moved, I stayed, we video chatted, we texted, we talked. We cried, we fought, we froze each other out. We cried some more, we talked, we visited, we loved. He entered the majors, I graduated from school, he bought a house and I moved to be with him. His career, my career, a balance and imbalance, a constant push and pull, and we daily fall deeper in love.
In the end, our love has done more than survived, it’s flourished.
Ryan places his fingers under my chin, and I meet his eyes. “You, Beth, are my number one. We’re in this together, and if I have to fly halfway across the world to be here, I will.”
“What if I’m not any good at being a mom?” I ask, because my mom was terrible. We haven’t had contact since I was seventeen, and I don’t have plans to speak to her again.
Ryan places his hands over mine, and that’s when I realize that my fingers are over my abdomen, over our child.
The love radiating from Ryan’s face fills me with so much joy that I could cry. It’s crazy, I hardly ever cried before my pregnancy, and now I’m a sobbing moron over a Facebook video of a child receiving a puppy for his birthday.
“You cover our child when you’re scared,” Ryan says. “You protect our baby because that’s who you are. You protect the ones you love. That is going to make you a great mom.”
And our child is going to have an excellent father. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Ignoring my flu warning, he lightly kisses me, yet it’s enough to get my heart moving.
“What time is the appointment?” Ryan asks against my lips.
“Eight.”
Another kiss, and he releases me just in time for us to overhear someone in the hallway say, “I think I saw Ryan Stone. I swear it was him.”
It is, but Ryan doesn’t belong to his fans this morning. He belongs to me. “I’m going to shower and change, and I have a favor to ask.”
“Ask away.”
“There’s a kid who’s had a rough night, and he may or may not have come in wearing a Ryan Stone baseball jersey. I can’t tell you why he’s here, and I can’t tell you what room he’s in, but you may want to wander very slowly past room two and poke your head in.”
“Did you tell him I’m your husband?”
I gasp and dramatically place a hand over my heart. “And divulge my alter ego status as Ryan Stone’s wife?” I waggle my eyebrows. “Never. Anyhow, around here, I’m more popular than you.”
“Yes, you are.” Ryan pulls me in close for another hug, and my favorite thing in the world is being in his arms. “You save lives, Beth. You inspire me.”
His words make me smile, and I playfully push him away. I head right for the locker room, and Ryan heads left for room two. I have the absolute best husband in the world.
I wasn’t prepared for the home crowd in the waiting room. Scott and his wife Allison, along with Ryan’s mom, made the two-hour drive from Groveton to Cincinnati. Scott and I are very close, Allison now feels like my sister, and Ryan’s mom has become a mom to me. The death of Ryan’s father last year devastated his family, yet has weirdly brought them closer together.
After a round of hugs for all, Ryan and I enter the examination room and share nervous small talk about how I didn’t tell anyone else besides blood family what was happening because I didn’t want to ruin the mood of the wedding if the news was bad.
Soon the door opens, and Dr. Julia Greenwood walks in. She greets me then Ryan, and even though she already knows the problem from our text conversations, I tell her officially how I’m cramping and that the cramps are so painful that I’ve doubled over. Then I tell her the worse, how there was blood when I used the bathroom. Not a lot, just some, but it scared me.
With a practiced comforting smile on her face, she asks me to lie back in the chair and squirts cold gel on my stomach. Ryan holds my hand as I hold my breath.
We stare at the screen. Waiting. Hoping. Praying.
Julia presses down on my stomach, moving the transducer this way then that way. Images fill the screen as she continues to search. Even with my experience in the medical field I can’t make sense of anything, because I’m desperate to see and hear a heartbeat.