Nora sighed. “No. I came back on Friday.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I came back to town. I wasn’t staying here.”
“Ohhhh,” Eve breathed.
“Yeah.” Here she went. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve been sleeping with Jake Ramsey for three months.”
Eve started laughing.
Nora opened her eyes. “Thanks for your support.”
“Sorry! Sorry! I just…Jake. Wow.”
“If you tell anyone, I’ll…” She didn’t know what to threaten. She had no leverage here.
“Tell everyone I’m getting an IUD?” Eve supplied helpfully.
“No. No. I would never do that.”
“Wow. You are hard-core.”
Nora stood. “I have to get back to work.”
“Hang on. You can’t just drop that bomb and leave!”
“I have patients waiting.”
“Okay, okay, but hang on for a second.” The smile slid off Eve’s face and she grabbed Nora’s upper arms. “Are you okay?”
“We’re not together. It’s just a sex thing.”
“Okay.” She did not sound convinced.
“It is. I mean, it’s a friend thing, too. But we’re not together. It’s a friends-with-benefits thing.”
“I don’t think those work in this town.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Nothing. Your secret is safe with me.”
That was one small piece of good news. “I have to get back to work.”
She turned and fled, but Eve followed. “You were gonna tell Maya about this, right? That’s why you were suggesting getting together at her place?”
Nora nodded.
“Okay, then. Maya’s tonight. I’ll arrange it. In fact, no, we’ll pick you up.”
Hey, happy New Year. Now that you have a phone I thought I’d wish you a great year and say that I was thinking of you on the thirtieth. I almost texted then, but IDK, it’s a weird day.
Jake looked at the text from Kerrie for the millionth time. This was the problem with phones. People texted you shit, and you had to reply. What was he supposed to say? “Happy New Year. I wasn’t thinking of you on the thirtieth or of Jude because I was too wrapped up in having meaningless sex”?
Or maybe—and this was the terrifying part—not-so-meaningless sex.
He went with It’s a hard day, isn’t it?
Kerrie: Yeah. But it gets easier with time. Life goes on, I guess.
Jake: Do you ever feel guilty about that?
Kerrie: About life going on, you mean?
Jake: Yeah.
Kerrie: Not really. Maybe at first. But I saw a shrink who read me the riot act about that. I don’t know if you’ve done that, but it helped a lot.
Clara had told him you didn’t necessarily need to formally close off a texting conversation, that it was okay to stop responding when things wound down. He was going to take her word for it. Because he had no idea what to say to that. He didn’t need a shrink to tell him to stop feeling bad that his child was dead.
More to the point, he didn’t want that.
Chapter Twenty-One
I can’t stop worrying about it. It’s irrational, but I can’t stop.”
“Of course you can’t,” Eve said. “We’ve all been there.”
Nora was hanging out with Eve in Maya’s apartment—Maya herself had gone on a food run. It was two weeks after the three of them had initially retreated here—the day Nora confided in them about Jake and the pregnancy scare—and it had become a tradition of sorts. A couple nights a week, they’d bring dinner and drinks to Maya’s and hang out and talk. It was nice.
Or it would have been nice, if Nora hadn’t been freaking out. “I haven’t been here, though,” she said to Eve.
“Really? You’ve never had a pregnancy scare?”
“Not really. I mean, I’ve been a day or two late once or twice.” And in those cases she’d always known what she would do. She’d been too young, or too buried in her education, to contemplate motherhood.
A baby was something she always vaguely planned on later. When she was older. More settled.
“Hello, hello, and welcome to Pregnancy Watch Day Seventeen.” Maya hustled into the apartment carrying a pizza box and some shopping bags. “What did I miss?”
“You went to Grand View for pizza?” Eve asked, nodding at the box emblazoned with the name of a pizzeria in the neighboring town.
“I did.” Maya set everything on the coffee table—Eve and Nora were on the sofa in her living room. “I also went to Grand View for this.” She rummaged in her bag, produced a pregnancy test, and banged it down on the table like she was triumphant over a winning poker hand.
Nora could practically feel her blood pressure spike. “Whoa.”
“Your period was due today, right?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t going to test for another day or two.” That’s what she would have advised a patient. Save your money. Most of the time your period will come—hell, most of the time it will come on the way home from the drugstore.
It was science.
Or denial.
One or the other.
“Anyway, it’s best to take those tests first thing in the morning when your HCG levels—that’s the pregnancy hormone—are highest.”
“Which is why I also got this.” Maya produced a second test, and Eve giggled. Maya shrugged. “I figured I was already in Grand View for the pizza. It’s not like you can stroll into the drugstore here and buy a pregnancy test without the whole town knowing your business.”
“That’s true,” Eve said.
“Just take it,” Maya said. “It’s one of those early tests that’s supposed to detect even before your period is due. If it’s negative, it will ease your mind at least somewhat, won’t it? And then you can take the other one first thing in the morning tomorrow to be sure.”
“Well…” Nora wasn’t sure why she was hesitating. Even though the doctor in her thought it was premature to pee on a stick at this point, the woman in her was like Gimme that thing.
“And if it’s negative tomorrow, you can come back here for some of this.” Maya produced a bottle of tequila.
Nora laughed and held out her palm. Maya slapped the test into it. “Go forth and pee. Think happy thoughts of tequila tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s Friday, though,” Eve said. “Bar night.”
“Well, I think we can all agree that a break from boys is in order.” Maya made a face at Eve. “Or at least two-thirds of us can agree. All boys do is cause problems.”
Nora left the door to the bathroom ajar so she could hear the conversation.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Eve said.
“You’re such a liar—that’s fake solidarity. Yours doesn’t cause problems.”
“That’s because he got it all out of his system when we were teenagers.”
“True.”
Eve, Nora had learned, used to come to Moonflower Bay in the summers when she was a kid, and had had a romance with Sawyer and then not seen him again for a decade, until she inherited the Mermaid Inn.