Page 107 of Denim & Diamonds

He looked away for a moment. “Feb, I can’t—”

“Non-negotiable.”

He sighed, his shoulders slumping in surrender. “Well, thank you. It means a lot that you’d want to do this for me.”

“You don’t have a lot of free days before he’s born. Go work on the cabin. Or start getting the apartment ready.”

He nodded silently, just staring at me.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“This whole thing is surreal. I don’t know how to feel about anything. Sometimes I’m excited about getting to meet my son. And other times, I’m totally afraid. The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that I miss you like crazy.”

My heart fluttered, though I tried to squelch the feeling. “I miss you, too.”

After we finished our call, I spent the rest of the afternoon shopping online for Brock. He’d insisted on giving me his credit card number and wouldn’t send the list until I promised to use it. I was pretty sure I’d ordered him all the main things he’d need, choosing what the Internet agreed were some of the best brands. I’d even added some things that weren’t on the list like baby spoons and silicone bibs. He wouldn’t need those right away, but it would be nice to not have to worry about buying them when he did.

And there was one other item I couldn’t resist throwing into the mix: little plaid footie pajamas that reminded me of one of Brock’s shirts.

***

At the end of the day, I was leaving the office when our public relations manager, Fallon, stopped me.

“Hey, Feb. Are you okay?”

“Sure,” I said as we walked down the hall together. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You left the meeting earlier very abruptly, and you’ve had your door shut all afternoon. Well, except when I stopped in to hand you a coffee.”

“I’m fine,” I assured her as we exited the revolving doors. “I just had some…personal stuff to take care of.”

She looked skeptical as we faced each other outside the building. “Okay, if you say so.”

I cocked my head. “You don’t believe me?”

Fallon looked around as if to make sure no one was near us and whispered, “I saw you looking at baby stuff when I barged into your office. You closed your computer window when you realized I was standing behind you with your coffee.” She lowered her voice further. “Are you pregnant?”

Oh Lord. She’d drawn the wrong conclusion. “No. Why would you jump right to that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I’m not pregnant. I was shopping for a friend. It’s not my baby.”

As soon as those words exited my mouth—not my baby—I felt it in the pit of my stomach. Reality hit me all at once.

Brock’s having a baby.

Not my baby.

The finality of it all threatened to choke me.

She snapped me out of my thoughts. “What’s going on, February?”

Fallon was a friend. I could trust her. I needed to let some of this out, so we moved to sit on a stone ledgeoutside our building, where I explained everything that had happened with Brock.

Fallon offered a sympathetic smile. “I once dated a guy who was a single dad. His son wasn’t a newborn, but pretty young, like three or four.”

“And?”