Lainey grabbed Bree’s hand. “Okay, we are taking you to the hospital. Where’s your car?”
“It’s getting detailed right now.”
“What?” Lainey was in a nightmare. A horror movie. “Why?”
“We’re at a car dealership, and I thought I peed in it.” This rendered Lainey speechless, which wasn’t easy. “What? It’s not like I’ll have time to deal with it when the baby comes.”
“You don’t have time to deal with it now!”
Another curse was swallowed in another contraction.
“Bree, those were really close together.” Lainey scanned the sea of cars in search of any other human she could wave down. “I’m going to run into the showroom and see if they’ll let me borrow a car.”
Bree shook her head as her hands rifled through her sling bag. “They only let you drive the car if they think you’re going to buy it.”
“Then I’ll say I’m buying a car.”
“No one’s going to believe that. You’re wearing shorteralls!”
Lainey stepped up onto the running board of a white SUV but still saw no one. Only rows upon rows of cars they couldn’t drive. They were dying of thirst in the ocean of responsibly priced German automobiles.
“I’m calling an Uber,” Bree said, tapping her phone screen.
“I’mthe Uber driver, and we are standing next to the hunk of scrap metal formerly known as my car.”
She held up her screen. “Then why does it say our car is two minutes away?”
The realization hit Lainey like a slow, easy wave cresting onto shore. “Is the driver’s name Elliot?”
Bree scrutinized the screen, breathing through her teeth.
A silver four-door pickup pulled into the dealership lot, serpentining the rows until it stopped directly at their feet.
In the seconds before the door flew open, Lainey’s mind—for some tortuous reason—went to Mr. Rodkey, her high school art teacher, who loved to bully her into displaying her work by weaponizing the same phrase he’d had burned into a wood plaque and mounted to the wall:Art isn’t complete until it is perceived.
For years, she’d been hiding her art in the woods, never to be observed and never to be complete. It was comforting thatnothing she worked on could ever really be finished or abandoned. It simply was. But she hadn’t realized that she’d been hiding, too—unobserved and perpetually in process. But Elliot had perceived her. Him seeing her had altered her. Completed her, in its own way. She wasn’t sure she could handle a second viewing.
As the door swung open, his eyes slammed into Lainey’s, a tidal wave of anger, pain, and—most frustratingly of all—recognition. She felt another small alteration on her heart. Ripped apart and made complete all over again.
One second ticked past and then, suddenly, Elliot was jumping out of the driver’s seat.
“Lainey, I’ve been—” He registered Bree’s bent posture and Lainey’s hand rubbing circles at the base of her friend’s spine. “Hospital?”
“Yes,” Bree moaned.
He nodded. “All right, Bree. Let’s get you comfortable in the back seat.”
Elliot made sure everyone was belted and secured before peeling out of the parking lot.
“I don’t want to have my baby in a car!” Bree cried.
“You’re not having your baby in a car. You’re having your baby in a hospital,” Elliot told her in a smooth, reassuring voice.
“Okay.” Bree sounded like she believed him. “Can you say more things? Your voice sounds like a doctor’s.”
Elliot’s laugh rumbled through the truck cab.
“What exactly does a doctor sound like?” Lainey asked, attempting to distract Bree.
