Chapter 30
Rory
It’s still dark when my alarm goes off. Garrett is a big, warm, heavy blanket all around me. One of his hands is under my shirt, cupped around my ribs but his thumb is hooked around the side of my boob, and his other arm is under me, possessively cupping my belly.
His thick erection is saying good morning, too, even if the rest of him is still mostly asleep.
“I’m going to grab a super quick shower,” I whisper.
He doesn’t move.
But when I tiptoe back downstairs, he’s in the kitchen making coffee.
“Morning,” he says gruffly, his voice still full of sleep.
Then he pulls me tight against me and kisses my damp hair, my forehead, my nose, and then finally my lips.
“Good morning,” I whisper against his kiss. “You don’t need to drive me. I can—”
“I want to. You might want to talk in the truck.” He grins. “And besides. The less time your mom has to spend looking me in the eye this trip, the better for all of us.”
“She was great last night.”
“She was.” He chuckles. “And me getting out of her hair today is a reward for that.”
At the hospital, we visit Dani first, who is discouraged to report that she’s still bleeding, but when I check her chart, I see that it’s greatly reduced overnight.
“Did you get to hear the heartbeat this morning?” I ask.
She immediately brightens up. “Yes. Nice and strong.”
“That’s what we like to hear.”
Jake arrives a few minutes later. He looks like he slept in a pile of kids, and Garrett immediately offers to go in search of coffee for him, even though we had big Thermoses on the drive down from Pine Harbour.
I leave Jake and Dani to have some time alone, and go to find Dr. Schmidt. The breech baby from the night before had converted to a c-section in the middle of the night after attempting a vaginal delivery, so he never ended up leaving.
“I got a few hours sleep in between, though. It’s turning into an eventful two days here.
And tomorrow is our weekly clinic day when we see every pregnant person in Bruce and Grey County.
” He grins. “A slight exaggeration. The midwifery clients don’t come in unless there’s a complication.
You can come if you’re a glutton for work. ”
“We’re driving back to Ottawa tomorrow, otherwise you know I would. All the OBs have clinic on the same day?”
“Yep. There’s only four of us right now. It’s jammed but manageable.”
“How many deliveries do you do each year?”
He starts rhyming off numbers. How many births the whole hospital sees—seven hundred a year, which surprises me for how quiet the ward has been yesterday and today—how the docs split up the calendar, how many midwives have admitting privileges.
And then he shrugs. “You’d have to ask my assistant.
I can remember all of the faces of the delivering moms, but numbers? I’m not a numbers guy. How about you?”
I can’t imagine just going with the flow like that. “Two hundred and three this year. Not all actively involved in, but c-sections scrubbed in for, or births assisted with.”
He rocks back on his heels. “That’s a lot.”
“Yeah. But that’s the life, right?”
He shrugs. “Yeah. Most places.”
That shrug sticks with me as a nurse swings by to tell us the procedure room is ready for us. There’s another resident with us this morning, a friendly family medicine PGY2. As he’s scrubbing up, Schmidt pulls me aside.
“Would you mind doing some teaching with Dr. Kumar this morning? Dani has already said she’s fine with having an extra observer.”
“Of course. I just assumed.”
“You’re a guest here. I wouldn’t impose if you weren’t willing.”
That sticks with me, too.
So the procedure takes a little longer than usual, but it’s good.
And when I walk back to Dani’s room with her on her stretcher, a kernel of an idea starts to bloom.
Schmidt joins us a few minutes later with discharge papers.
“Take it easy. Let your husband do everything.”
“On it,” Jake says, dead seriously.
“You might have cramping and more bleeding over the next couple of days, but that’s normal. I texted Kerry and she said she has a handheld doppler you can borrow to keep hearing the heartbeat.”
“I ordered one online last night,” Dani confesses.
“Try to use it sporadically. Don’t let it become your arbiter of the pregnancy progression, all right? But I think you’ll be fine. And I’ll see you in my clinic in two weeks.”
“Thank you.”
Garrett holds out my coat. “Ready to go to cousin lunch?”
“Yep.” I blow kisses to Dani and Jake. “You’ll be missed today.”
“Tell them all she’s resting,” Jake says, worry pinching at the corners of his eyes.
“I don’t think he’s going to let her lift a finger for the next six months,” Garrett says as we head down the corridor.
I agree. “That bed rest might stretch into the postpartum period, and frankly, that sounds delighful.”
Garrett looks at me sideways. “Yeah? So if we ever…”
“Bite your tongue. I mean, yes, we can have kids. But you can’t pull that bossy shit with me.”
He laughs. “Two things can be true, babe. You’re the bossy one in our relationship, and I’ll still be laying down the rest law if anything ever happens to you in pregnancy.
And now I know who to call if I need another doc to lecture you.
” He jerks his thumb back in the direction of where Schmidt is working. “That guy.”
“Wow, you went from jealous to conspiring with the guy in less than twenty-four hours!”
He tugs me close. “I’m confident that you’re all mine. No need to be jealous when I can still feel you clenching around me.”
I bury my face in his chest, blushing like mad.
But I’m smiling so hard my cheeks hurt, too.
The sun is shining for the drive back to Pine Harbour. The snow that fell last night glitters like crystals in all directions, a totally different vibe from when we first arrived, but the roads are clear.
“How attached are you to Ottawa?” I finally blurt out. “Like this rugby team you joined…what sort of a commitment did you make?”
“Is that what you’ve been churning about over there?” He shifts his hand on the steering wheel so he can reach across the console and squeeze the back of my neck. “It’s a rec league thing. I’m sure I can find a team anywhere else. Why, are you thinking of moving to Australia or the UK?”
“I was thinking a little closer to home. Not forever. I know you don’t love it here, but the pace of work would be better for me.
I don’t even know if they’d want me, not really, but I’m pretty good at horning my way into things, and if worst came to worst, I could pick up shifts at a walk-in clinic or sign up for a family medicine re-training, or—”
“Whoa, okay, slow down. You’ve jumped way past where I was thinking you were going.”
I scrub my hands over my face. “I don’t want to be a big city hospitalist.”
“That’s great.”
“Well, it’s…something. Those are like, ninety percent of the jobs. And I have a mountain of student debt.”
“I’m pretty sure even small town family docs make enough to eventually pay that back.”
“I don’t know if I want to manage a practice of my own, though, either. And I know how that sounds.”
“How do you think that sounds?”
“Like I’m spoiled and I don’t want to do the hard work of being a grown up.”
“You want to lean into your strengths and not get weighed down by stuff that stresses you out,” he gently corrects. “Plus, you miss the tree farm. Honestly, I was fully expecting you to say you wanted to quit medicine and take over from your parents so they could retire.”
I gape at him. “What?”
He shrugs. “I’d have gone along with that, too.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He nods for good measure. “If you would be genuinely happy doing that, I’d be in, one hundred percent. I can fix cars and be in the army just about anywhere in the country. And if you wanted to go to Australia, I’d give it all up to be a rugby-playing house husband.”
“I don’t want to take over the tree farm. All of my fears about running my own practice would be tenfold worse trying to run my own farm.” I take a deep breath. “Oh. That’s probably where my fear comes from, isn’t it?”
“Probably. I read somewhere that deep down, we’re just our younger selves, constantly trying to process the world around us through the lens of what was going on around us when we were forming our permanent memories. Like, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old.”
“You read that? I’m impressed.”
He laughs out loud. “Okay, I saw it on the internet. I watched a lot of self-help content while we were broken up.”
“Still sounded good.”
“Some of those apps are wild. It was like it knew that I was a miserable fuck who missed his girlfriend and wanted to figure out what went wrong.”
“I don’t want you to be miserable again, if we move.”
He rubs his thumb along the back of my neck. “I’ll tell you if I am. And we’ll tackle it together.”
“We can’t live at the farm, though.”
“God no. Cassie only lasted a day and a half. You wouldn’t make it six hours.” He shrugs. “We can rent a place to start? See how we like it. And if we don’t, then we’ll move somewhere else.”
“Just like that?”
He exhales and shakes his head. “Not just like that, babe. That took a year of being miserable, eight months of being broken up, a dozen ninety minute fights, you ovulating just extra enough to break down and need me, and a dead car battery to get to this point.”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
He slows down at the turn to Pine Harbour. “Yeah. I think this was a hard won gentle victory.”
I reach over and stroke the back of his neck as he needs both hands to make the turn.
And then as soon as he parks at Mac’s Diner, he tangles our fingers together and tugs me across the console for a kiss.
“I want you to be happy, too,” I whisper against his mouth. “I want to find a place where we both want to be.”
“Shut up and kiss me.”
I’m laughing against his lips when there’s a knock at the truck window.
“You really want to move back to this town?” Garrett is grumbling. “Can’t even kiss my girl in peace.”