Page 31 of Over and Above (Mount Hope #4)

Chapter Thirty-One

Eric

My house always had a certain energy in the predawn hours. Due to my work schedule, I’d seen more of those hours than most, and I found something deeply calming about being awake while knowing the rest of the house was tucked away, safely sleeping. However, after the excitement of Maren maybe being in labor, along with my earlier talk with Magnus, I was anything but calm.

Also anything but sleepy. The small room on the third floor, where I’d slept for over a year, suddenly seemed tiny and cramped. The bed was lumpy, the covers itchy, the wallpaper faded. Stifling, walls closing in along with my thoughts about how to right things with Magnus. He and the dogs were back at the carriage house for the night, yet they might as well be on the moon for how disconnected I felt.

How awkward would it be if you weren’t friends? Diesel’s comment kept churning in my brain. How terrible would it be to lose Magnus’s friendship? That wasn’t what Diesel had meant, but all I could picture was years of stilted interactions. No more movie nights. No more couch cuddles. No more dancing in the carriage house. No more us.

Unable to stomach that thought, I ended up where I so often did when sleep eluded me. After quietly trekking downstairs to the living room, I made myself comfortable with a blanket and a familiar movie. The trio of bridesmaids in the movie were confronting yet another comedic disaster when footsteps sounded behind the couch.

“Yes?” I swiveled, expecting to find Wren up much too early or much too late.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone else was up.” Marissa came around the couch to stand in front of me. She wore yoga pants and a T-shirt with a tarot card on the font. “Are you on duty today?”

“Luckily, no. I asked off for the shower, and I don’t go back until Tuesday.” I was less concerned with the interruption and more with why she was up at this hour. “Everything okay?”

“Very. You might be a grandpa by Tuesday.” Marissa smiled warmly. “Maren’s contractions started back up. I’m letting her and Diesel have some alone time, but my intuition says we might need the birthing tub soon after all. Figured I’d work on setting that up.”

“Intuition is a funny thing,” I mused, thinking how mine kept failing me where Magnus was concerned. I simply wanted a sign to tell me which direction we were supposed to head from this fork in the road.

“I also have years of experience.” Marissa put her hands on her hips, tone pointed.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean anything bad by the comment.” Trying to recover, I spoke faster. “I get that professional intuition too. Sometimes, you just know a call is going to go sideways. Or the opposite, where the patient is freaking out, but you can sense the situation isn’t as dire.”

“Exactly.” Dropping her arms, Marissa shifted to a less bristly tone. “And intuition can change as something progresses. Yesterday, I was thinking false alarm and another week or so before we meet this baby. Now, I’m thinking the next twenty-four hours or so. The thing about intuition is you have to be open to evolving and also to being wrong.”

Oh. Well, there was an interesting wrinkle. Last spring, my intuition said that Magnus was a player, but I had indeed been wrong. What else might I be wrong about?

“Well said.” My voice came out weak as the wheels in my brain continued to spin in the snow of my present dilemma. Time for a distraction. “Can I help with the pool?”

“Absolutely.” Marissa smiled like a woman who knew better than to turn down help. “Maren had planned on blowing up the tub in the living room rather than trying to fit it in the basement, but with your permission, I’d like to consider using the primary where I was resting earlier. If we move the bed to one side, there will be enough room, and it will give Maren more privacy.”

“More privacy is a good idea.” I glanced over at the stairs. It wouldn’t be too many more hours until Wren and the rest of the house were awake. Maren might want a home birth, but she didn’t need an unintended audience.

I followed Marissa back to my bedroom, where we worked together to move the nightstands and push the bed under the bank of windows on the far wall.

“Ow.” Straightening, Marissa rubbed her lower back. “That thing is a beast.”

“You okay? What hurts?” I asked, not wanting to sound too concerned but slipping into paramedic mode anyway. “I’ve never had the chance to ask how you healed from the accident.”

“The accident was mainly my leg, along with the ruptured spleen. This is just my back getting older.” She gave a self-conscious shrug.

“I feel that. Getting older sucks. And that was quite the ordeal you had in the spring.”

“Yeah, I finally retired the cane, but some days are better than others.” Marissa tore open a package for a waterproof tarp and spread it over the carpet with my help. “I’m back to work, though, and that helps tremendously. Maren was one of my first clients when I started taking on births again and being here for my clients has been good motivation for the continued physical therapy.”

“Loving your work always helps,” I agreed, trying to smooth over my earlier misstep. “Did you always want to be a midwife?”

“Yes and no. Midwifery is a family tradition, and when I was younger, I loved going along to help my mother or my grandmother. But I dabbled in motocross as a teen, went to college, discovered the market for poets is rather slim, and spent a few years working for a nonprofit. Found my way back to birthwork as my mother slowed her practice.”

“Life has a way of leading us back where we started.”

“Or to entirely new destinations,” Marissa countered, sounding not unlike Magnus. And I supposed that was fair. I had a harder time rolling with life’s punches and shifting direction than either of them seemed to. Marissa dragged over the box for the birthing tub, which we had fetched earlier from her car. “How about you? Were you always going to be a paramedic?”

“My original plan out of high school was medicine, actually.” I didn’t feel like getting into the whole thing with defying my parents and the fire, but I shared that much. “I liked the idea of being a pediatrician.”

“You would have been good at that.” She worked efficiently, unrolling the soft plastic tub.

“That’s what Montgomery was always saying.” I quirked my lips at the memory. As earlier, guilt crept up my back. I didn’t like having less than kind thoughts about Montgomery, but as a doctor, he’d valued his profession highly. “He tried to get me to go back to school back when I was younger and we were first dating. But I like first responder work. I like the pace, and the hours have worked for raising the kids. I think I’m good at it too.”

“I’ve seen you working. You’re very good at your job,” Marissa allowed as she set up the air pump to inflate the tub. “And you’re a good dad.”

“Thanks for saying that.” I joined her in shaking out the tub so the pump worked more effectively.

“I’m not simply saying it.” She shot me a pointed look. “I see a lot of new dads, experienced fathers, and grandparents in my practice. Not everyone is as good at centering their kids as you have been.”

“I try.” And now I was right back to my discussion with Magnus. I’d been so certain that not dating was best for the kids, but what if I was wrong? And at what point did my own needs matter? In our adoption classes, the instructor had often talked about how self-care made better parents, but I continued to waffle as to whether wanting Magnus was self-love or selfish or some mixture of both.

“You do more than try.” Marissa gave me a fast pat on the arm. “And I know home birth wasn’t your first or second choice for Maren, but you’ve rolled with the idea admirably.”

“Thanks.” I blew out a breath. A truce of sorts settled between us. We both respected each other as professionals, and that went a long way, even if part of me continued to wish we were driving to the hospital right then, snow storm and all. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing to do or say is, especially as they get older.”

“I bet.” A certain wistfulness in Marissa’s tone gave me pause.

“You don’t have kids?”

“You want the short answer or the long answer?” She sat back on her heels as we waited for the tub to inflate.

“Whichever you’re comfortable with.”

“I always thought I’d hit my mid-thirties with a house full of kids and a partner I adored.” She offered a crooked smile, but her eyes stayed solemn. “Now forty is inching closer, and the partner hasn’t materialized.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Eh. Some of it’s on me.” She flicked her wrist, waving off my concern. “You think you’re invincible and have all the time in the world in your twenties. And then thirty hits, but you’ve still got time. My accident showed me time is finite and rather cruel.”

“I know that feeling well.” All the time in the world. That was how I’d felt when I’d first met Montgomery, the hot, new doctor in town. Falling in love with him had been as easy as breathing, and we’d tumbled right into commitment, home ownership, adoption, another adoption, all before time reared its ugly head.

“I haven’t told many yet, but I’m starting fertility treatments,” Marissa said quietly.

“You’re going to have a baby?” I wasn’t sure if congratulations was the right response.

“That’s the hope. Screw waiting for the right partner. Single parenthood isn’t the path I originally would have chosen, but I’m not willing to wait forever for the partner of my dreams to show up at the exact perfect moment.”

Again, she reminded me of Magnus…who wasn’t willing to wait forever either. He wanted to date, travel, love openly and loudly, and he wouldn’t wait around indefinitely for me to be ready.

“Timing is hard.” My voice came out rough, chest full. I’d met Montgomery at the perfect moment in my life, and that still hadn’t had a happy ending. And the timing with Magnus sucked, but the thought of breaking things off made my back tighten and my bones ache. Timing or not, I wanted him. “And even when the plan works out, sometimes fate has other ideas.”

“Yep.” Marissa nodded. The pool was finished inflating, so she spread a hygienic liner over it and busied herself sorting out hoses. “But I’m actually really excited about this new direction. I’m embracing it. My family is super supportive, which helps. And I’m not ruling out a partner in the future. However, I’m sure dating as a single parent can be…interesting.”

She offered an expectant look like I should be at the ready with dating advice.

“I wouldn’t exactly know,” I admitted. “My friends keep wanting me to get back out there. Apps. Setups. Singles mixers.”

“All of which suck. Trust me. Dating is hazardous.” She released a low groan before standing. “I’m at a point now where I think I’d rather collect friends. Anything else is going to have to happen organically.”

Organically. All this time, I’d been refusing my friends’ efforts at matchmaking, yet Magnus had fallen right into my lap, almost literally if one considered the night of the fire. And few things in life were as organic or natural as our friendship, which had grown slowly, like Maren’s baby, over the last nine months. Could I really walk away from that because of timing or fear? Could I be like Marissa, who was chasing her dreams even if they looked different than she’d expected?

“It’s not going to be easy being a single parent. But it is worth it. I admire you.” I chose my words carefully, but Marissa still frowned.

“You admire me?”

“You have a dream, and you’re going for it. Fearless.”

“Oh, I’m scared shitless.” She waved a hose at me. “You have no idea. But nothing good ever came of sitting out life on the sidelines.”

She was scared and doing it anyway. My head spun, a wave of dizziness washing over me. I steadied myself on the bed right as Diesel burst into the room.

“Marissa! Maren’s water just broke.”

And just like that, my world shifted yet again. Ready or not, this baby was coming.