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Focusing on the woman once again, I asked, “Where did you get my name?”
Her hand instantly went to her stomach, an unconscious movement, but one that when matched with her next words meant more than I could have ever imagined. “From Slider.”
I looked to Ham who stood silently with his mouth hanging slightly open in shock.
My palms started to sweat as I looked back at this woman standing on the sidewalk, obviously feeling unsure and out of place. She was so innocent and seemed so genuine. I knew I couldn’t turn her away. My respect for my fallen brother wouldn’t let me at least hear her out.
“Come…” I waved my hand for her to follow me, “… Ham will watch your car. Let’s go to my office.” I nodded, her shoulders slumping in relief as she walked inside the clubhouse gates.
Chelsea stood by her car waiting for me with obvious interest in this strange woman who I was allowing onto club property.
I took her hand as I walked past. “Gonna need you for this one.”
She fell into step beside me, leaning forward to peek at the other woman to my right. “Hi, I’m Chelsea,” she offered with a gentle smile.
The smile was returned. “My name’s Piper.”
“It’s nice to meet you.”
“You too, finally.”
This confused Chelsea and she pulled back, looking up at me with a questioning frown. I waited until we stepped into my office and offered Piper a seat before I explained to Chelsea the situation. “Piper tells me that Slider gave her my name.”
A tiny gasp fell from my woman’s lips as she settled into the chair next to Piper and I took a seat opposite the both of them in my office chair.
“I think you need to start from the beginning,” I urged Piper, tapping my fingers impatiently on the arm of my chair. My heart was beating with trepidation.
Why was she here?
“I was Josh’s nurse at the doctor’s office,” she answered quietly. “At first I would just sit in on appointments with the doctor, help with tests and things like that. Then when things progressed with the cancer, he started requesting I do his hormone injections.”
Hearing the word cancer still chilled my bones to their core. Slider was always so happy, so healthy and carefree. Yet this disease didn’t care who you were. Healthy, young, old, smart, dumb, girl, boy—it cared nothing for those things. It just came along, spreading heartache and destroying lives.
I’d never admitted it to anyone but Chelsea, but I was glad Slider did what he did for Hadley that day. Because I was almost completely sure that I would not have been able to cope with watching him wither away to nothing. Sure, it would have given us more time with him, but he would have been in pain, unhappy and angry at the world. He would have refused our help and support and tried to alienate himself from us. He would have tried to protect us.
“We got intimate once, very early on…” Her voice croaked and she coughed, attempting to clear it, obviously choked up. A smile touched the corner of her mouth. “He was very charming.”
Chelsea laughed softly. “That he was.”
Piper met her eyes and they both smiled fondly. Piper placed her hands in her lap and turned to me. “Look, I’m not here to tell you that he was the love of my life. Could he have been? Maybe. But we really didn’t know each other that long. He was sweet and he made me laugh, and the way he spoke about you all was with great love and admiration.”
My body tingled at her words. They had an impact.
“Obviously he stopped coming for his treatments,” she continued. “No one knew why. I knew he was struggling a little with what was going on and how his life was being impacted. So I figured he would just come back eventually when someone maybe talked some sense into him.”
She echoed the words in my head.
“But he never did.” She shook her head. “Then I saw the obituary in the paper and…” She stopped for a moment, clenching her fists in her lap and digging her nails into the skin.
Chelsea reached over, placing her hand on Piper’s arm in support. She laughed, tears dripping from her cheeks as she struggled to hold them back. “I kept putting off telling him about the baby. I kept saying… oh, I’ll do it next week… next week… next week, and then next week came, and he wasn’t there.”
Slider’s baby.
This woman is carrying Slider’s baby.
His legacy.
His DNA.
