Someone to Love (Hope Falls: Main Street #2)

Chapter 1

“There are other options.”

That sentence, spoken in the calm and careful tone of someone professionally trained to deliver emotional IEDs with the minimum possible shrapnel, felt equal parts clinical and deeply personal.

Dr. Stephanie Roemer, Steph to her friends and colleagues, was ruthlessly efficient in her compassion and one of the only people on earth who could wield a speculum and a sense of humor with equal skill. Today, however, the humor was subdued.

Those were not the four words Poppy Davies wanted to hear coming into this appointment.

Over the past eighteen months she’d created a diagnostic bingo card for her reproductive health.

It was dark, but it was the only way she knew how to get through the difficult journey.

And now, after countless appointments and five doctors, every box was filled in: “run more tests,” “asymptomatic endometriosis,” “scar tissue,” “it’s not your fault,” “reduced egg quality,” “blocked fallopian tubes," “implantation problems,” and finally, “there are other options,” bingo.

One of the perks of working at a hospital was first dibs on last-minute cancellations.

Which is how she found herself lying on her back with a device that resembled an oversized electric toothbrush dipped in KY Jelly shoved up her hoo-ha, exploring her uterus.

To be fair, the transvaginal ultrasound wand was technically state of the art, but from Poppy’s vantage point it was simply a cold, foreign object that exposed her damage.

Above her, she stared at off-white ceiling tiles made popular in the mid-90s that could have been hung in any clinical setting.

These, however, were adorned with glow-in-the-dark stars arranged in random constellations.

They’d probably been placed there by a nurse trying to create a more whimsical environment, or maybe by some hopeful administrator who thought they’d distract patients from their own existential dread.

Poppy focused on them now. It was either that or look at the monitor, which showed a gloomy landscape that was supposed to contain her hopes and dreams but instead looked like a haunted moon.

If she focused hard enough, she could almost believe she was floating in space, drifting between the cracks in the galaxy, instead of lying in a backless gown with her feet in cold, steel stirrups as her future was rationed out in percentages and probabilities.

Before coming up to the fourth floor, she’d forbidden herself from crying, but apparently her tear ducts hadn’t gotten the memo.

A hot, prickly pressure gathered behind her eyes.

She could feel it would only take the gentlest nudge, a hand on her shoulder, a look of pity, or a sympathetic, “Oh sweetie,” to break the dam.

What made this all so ridiculous was that she should have been prepared.

She should have been used to it by now. This wasn’t her second, third, or even her fourth opinion, it was her fifth.

Before Steph, she’d heard four different physicians tell her four different variations of the same theme: “I’m sorry, but…

” There was, theoretically, some comfort in consensus, except when the consensus was that your body’s warranty had expired before you could actually use it.

Ultimately, she only had herself to blame for being an incurable optimist. Poppy was the person who always packed for a trip that could get cancelled, who never deleted her exes’ numbers, and who wholeheartedly believed in the possibility of a lottery win despite never having bought a ticket.

Okay, that one was just delusional. She was the girl who read her horoscopes, plural, for the week ahead and circled the best one.

She couldn’t help but think that if she just kept showing up to these appointments, eventually, the universe would blink and the answer would be different.

But the universe did not blink. It just stared at her, unflinching.

There was something deeply wrong with a world in which everyone else was conceiving babies by accident, sometimes on the same couch as leftover Taco Bell wrappers—which is precisely what happened the night her sister Phoebe and husband Duane got busy and got pregnant with her five-month-old niece Bristol—while Poppy had to schedule each indignity in advance and pay a specialist’s consult fee for the privilege to find out if even the possibility of that happening was in the cards for her.

She was so lost in this private inventory of grief that she was startled when Steph withdrew the wand and set it aside with a gentle thunk.

“You can sit up,” Steph instructed.

The snap of rubber gloves reverberated in the sterile examination room, the sound ricocheting off the steel fixtures, the tile, and even the clear acrylic tissue box mounted to the wall.

Poppy, who’d been trying to breathe through her mouth to avoid the smell of disinfectant and latex, gingerly sat up on the table.

The vinyl crinkled loudly beneath her, making her feel more exposed than the paper gown already had.

She tugged at the hem of her blue modesty gown, trying to maintain some dignity as the exam table paper stuck to the back of her thighs.

Thanks to an ample backside whose cheeks acted like the hungry-hungry hippo to all underwear and disposable lining, she’d developed a technique to avoid the dreaded paper wedgie, hold the edge with one hand, shift a cheek, slide and sweep at the same time.

If she timed it right, she achieved a smooth landing with no crepe lining between her cheeks.

She succeeded, resettling herself as the clank of the metal trash can announced the end of her friend’s examination and the finality of the diagnosis that had been trailing her through four different doctors.

Steph rolled her wheeled stool across the small space, a practiced ballet of medical grace, and swiveled to face the monitor, affixed to a pivoting mechanical arm.

The screen’s blue glow illuminated her profile, which was shadowed and tense.

For a moment, Poppy wondered what Steph saw on the screen that made her jaw clench like that.

She cleared her throat, and Poppy braced herself. Steph had a repertoire of “doctor voice” tones: the briskly professional, the warmly reassuring, and the gently regretful. Today, she drew on all three.

“From what I can see, your endometrial lining looks the same as last cycle. I know you were hoping for more progress. The medications are not stimulating a response.” She clicked on the mouse, scrolling down.

“Everything I saw today tracks with what the findings are here. The fibroids are stable, but there’s no improvement.

Your AMH is still low, but not zero. The endometriosis is behaving, which is a good sign, but…

I don’t want to sugarcoat this.” She swiveled to face Poppy.

Her brown eyes softening behind the glasses.

“It would be very difficult to conceive naturally.”

That wasn’t news to Poppy. She’d spent hours researching her own diagnosis, or should she say multiple diagnoses.

Starting with Asherman’s, that benign but inexorable thief.

Scar tissue, a little bit here and a little bit there, and suddenly the entire ecosystem was out of whack.

She’d read the forums, the tear-stained blogs, and the “miracle baby!” stories that always ended in GoFundMe links or awkwardly cheerful product ads.

A decade of living with a uterus that could out-bloody a horror movie, and she could recite her own reproductive medical history as easily as others recited the alphabet.

There was a time she thought these stories, the ones she related to, were unique, tragic, and somehow noble, as if enduring all the pain and suffering in silence would someday be rewarded. It started in her early teens.

She’d spent several days a month in high school doubled over in the nurse’s office, gritting her teeth through excruciating agony that made even breathing feel dangerous, the linoleum picking up her sweat as she waited for the Advil to kick in.

Every single CVS employee knew her by name, and Poppy could rattle off the names and side effects of every OTC painkiller and every possible alternative treatment recommended by questionable online forums. At twenty, after she started working and finally got decent insurance, she was diagnosed with fibroids.

At first, the doctor had been so casual about her condition that she’d almost missed the gravity.

“Your uterus is an overachiever, it decided to explore the rest of your body when it should have stayed home,” he’d joked.

That first sonogram had been so grainy and indistinct, it looked more like a weather report than a medical image.

They tried several treatments, but when those gave her no relief, he suggested “surgical intervention.” The words were scary, but she’d felt oddly hopeful.

Surgery meant a solution, possibly an end to the cycle of agony.

She’d watched too much Grey’s Anatomy to not believe in the possibility of a medical miracle.

Since she already worked as an x-ray tech, hospitals weren’t scary places to her.

She scheduled the surgery, ignored the warnings on the paperwork, and told herself it would all be over soon.

The recovery was messy but manageable. She even joked about it.

When Miss Carol, the woman who practically raised her, would text her to check in during her recovery after the surgery, she’d reply, “I’m fine, don’t ovary-act.

” She’d also sent her a photo in bed with her heating pad on, saying, “Thanks, Eve, I hope the apple was worth it.” Miss Carol, who had been a Sunday school teacher for forty years, found it hilarious.