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Not some random doctor that I didn’t know and trust.
“I got it,” I disagreed, feeling things inside of me start to take flight at what I was about to hear.
“Tide, hey,” Daniel said the moment that I answered. “You got a minute to come up here?”
I swallowed hard, not liking the tone of his voice. He had his doctor voice on. That never meant good things.
“Sure. Are you on the OB floor?” I asked, feeling my heart jerk in response.
“Yeah, my office,” he said, sounding bored.
After hanging up, I put my computer to sleep and took the stairs two at a time as I hastily made my way to the floor that obstetrics was on. Daniel had an office on the floor that he spent the majority of his time on. I, on the other hand, was all over the fuckin’ place, and my office was on the end of the block of hallways that led off the cafeteria floor.
When I got into Daniel’s office, it was to see a red-eyed Coreline staring at the door as if she’d been waiting for me to come in.
It’d been hours and hours since her appointment, what the hell was she still doing here?
I opened my mouth to ask when Daniel gestured toward the monitor that was hanging on the wall.
I opened my mouth and then closed it.
Because it didn’t take a genius to know what I was seeing.
A breast was on the monitor, and on that monitor was a spot that wasn’t supposed to be there.
My eyes flashed to Coreline’s dry but still red eyes.
“Is it cancer?” I asked.
Daniel cleared his throat.
“This is a mammogram taken today,” he said. “I’ve already put her into contact with a colleague of mine. Dr. Denny. He’s going to take over her case—at least for this aspect—and go from there. She has a biopsy scheduled, but with her refusal to…”
“Refusal of what? Why?” I asked, sounding as if I was far away.
Or maybe it was just my ears.
I didn’t know.
“I’m pregnant,” Coreline said softly. “I have a suspicious lump on my chest that they’re doing a biopsy on, and I’m pregnant. I won’t do anything to hurt this baby.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it, unsure of what to say.
So, like the asshole I was, I walked out and didn’t look back.
• • •
I stared at the front door of Bram’s house and wondered if I should go in.
I wasn’t one hundred percent sure why I’d gone to Bram’s place and not anyone else’s, yet there I was. Sitting on my bike, staring at his front door, as if it was the answer to a problem he could solve.
To say I’d overreacted would be an understatement.
I didn’t only overreact.
I blew the whole situation out of the atmosphere with my reaction.
Granted, it wasn’t every day that you were told that you had a kid on the way. Oh, and the woman you loved had cancer.
Those were two very scary things thrown at me all at once.
One scary thing that I’d thought I’d been ready for and wasn’t.
“I can’t deal with this,” I’d murmured to Coreline upon arriving home and finding her there waiting for me to arrive. Upon seeing her, I’d walked past her into my house, grabbed my leather jacket, thrown it over my shoulders in the next second, and had the words ‘bye’ on my lips in the next.
Needless to say, instead of staying and figuring it out, I walked out of the house, to my bike, and rode off without another word.
I’d spent all day numb.
I’d spent all lunch hour researching everything, including what might or might not happen to the baby, as well as the mother, if a pregnancy continued to term. If the baby would be affected by cancer treatments. If the mother would. How fast would it spread if left untreated?
Over and over, article after article, I read and read and read.
The front door opened and Dorcas, Bram’s wife, came rushing out of it with a plastic garbage bag full of something.
I hopped off my bike and headed that way, startling her when I said, “Can I help you?”
She blinked, stunned to see me standing there. Or stunned to find me offering to help.
I wasn’t sure.
She dropped it on the ground, and I picked it up, just as surprised to feel how heavy it was.
“What’s in this? Rocks?” I wondered. “Where are you going with it?”
“The car,” she murmured softly, not answering my first question. “Thank you.”
I turned and headed toward Dorcas’s car, shoving the bag into the trunk when she popped it open for me.
“Bram needs to get you a new car,” I mumbled as I saw how run down the ol’ girl was looking.
Bram had gotten the car in high school when he’d been dating Mimi. It looked like it was on its last leg.
