15. Lydia
15
LYDIA
I was sad that Miles had returned to the city, but I honestly hadn’t thought I was going to be so sad that it would make me sick. I hadn’t felt well on and off before he showed up, but after he left, it was almost like I was sick. Almost.
I felt sick to my stomach like I had eaten entirely too much, but the problem was, I was barely eating at all. I was sad, uncomfortable, and depressed. Was I sad because I didn’t feel well, or was I not feeling well because I was so sad?
When Miles had been around, I had been too distracted to notice whether my stomach felt woozy or not. He made me feel giddy and like I was floating in the clouds. There was no possible way I would have admitted to feeling slightly off during my time with him.
I didn’t want to do anything. When my most recent guests checked out, I just didn’t have the energy to go clean and prepare their room for the next guest. Instead, I called Mrs. Griffin to see if she was interested in picking up an extra shift and put the Closed sign on the door. I went to take a nap until she showed up.
When I got up from my nap, I stumbled my way out to the lobby. I had one of those uncomfortable nap hangovers, like I wasn’t quite awake yet.
Mrs. Griffin took one look at me and started cooing. “Oh, sweetie, you look about done in.”
I felt ‘done in’. I pressed my palm to my forehead and then to my cheeks, trying to feel whether I was running a fever or not.
“Are you feeling unwell?” she asked.
“I am so exhausted.” I admitted. I did not mention how incredibly sad I was that Miles had left, but she was smart enough to figure it out. After all, he wasn’t sitting in the lobby playing on his phone like he had been the past few days.
It had been nice having him around. I wished he would have stayed longer. But it wasn’t as if we had some kind of arrangement for whatever this relationship thing was between us. Was what we had even a relationship? Whatever it was, I wished I could have more.
“I’m just not feeling right,” I admitted. “Thank you for being able to come in. I’m going to head back to bed, I think.”
“Have you eaten anything today?” she asked.
I shook my head. It made me dizzy. I braced against the front desk and closed my eyes tight, hoping the spinning would stop.
“You sit down right here,” Mrs. Griffin said as she took my arms and guided me to one of the lobby chairs. “If anyone needs anything, you tell them I will be right back.”
She bustled down the hallway toward my apartment, and then she turned around and marched right past me. “I keep forgetting your kitchen is on the opposite side from where you live. Stay put, I’ll be right back.”
I certainly did not feel like moving. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, she returned from the kitchen carrying a steaming mug.
“I made you some chicken noodle soup. It’s still hot, so blow on it.” She set the mug down on the side table.
“Thank you. You didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“Somebody did, and I thought you were about to fall over. If your tummy is sour, just sip the broth. The noodles are good if you think you can handle a little food. Get that in you, then go back to bed.”
I had to blink back tears. Right at that moment, she reminded me so much of my mother. Aunt Ruth hadn’t had a compassionate bone in her body. I forgot that people could be nurturing.
After I finished the soup, I excused myself back into my little apartment and left Mrs. Griffin to handle the front desk. I knew she could handle it.
My stomach felt somewhat settled. I headed back to my apartment with cautious optimism. It really wasn’t much of an apartment—two bedrooms, a common bathroom, and a small common room with a TV. On my dream list of renovations to the inn was a proper apartment, complete with a kitchen. As it was, my kitchen was on the opposite side of the lobby, and I treated the lobby as my private living room, where I could curl up in front of a fire and read. I knew it wasn’t typical, but it was home. Now it just seemed like an empty hotel suite. Something was missing.
Someone, not something. Miles was missing. Before I dissolved into a puddle of tears, I crawled back into bed and hugged the pillow that still smelled like him.
I must have fallen back asleep. I never took naps like this before. I really hoped I wasn’t getting sick. I couldn’t afford to get sick.
In the morning, I woke refreshed and felt perfectly healthy when my alarm went off. I got up to put out the pastries and start a fresh pot of coffee brewing. The smell hit me wrong and then next thing I knew, I was running for the bathroom.
I was going to have to see the doctor if this kept up. I didn’t have a stomachache, just all this annoying sickness. It took a while for my stomach to settle, but then I felt perfectly fine.
The Fondas, the couple who had checked in a few days earlier, were now standing in the lobby with their suitcases, ready to check out when I came back out front. The woman kept opening the pastries, smelling them, and then she would make a very unpleasant sound that I thought might inspire my stomach to revolt again.
She handed pastry after pastry to her husband. “I can’t eat this, you take it.”
He set the pastry down on the counter.
“Is there something wrong with the pastries?” I finally asked. I don’t think I would’ve been bothered if she had sat there and eaten everything in the basket, but she wasn’t eating anything. She was opening them and wasting them. Her husband wasn’t eating them either. I needed to know if they had gone bad or something.
“Everything smells bad to her right now. If she took a bite, she would realize they were perfectly fine,” he said.
“I can’t get past the smell. He’s right, everything smells absolutely disgusting,” she said.
Panic washed over me. Was there something in the inn that I couldn’t smell?
“There’s nothing here,” she said as she looked at me.
I didn’t have a good poker face. I must have had a very obviously concerned look on my face.
“I recently found out that I’m pregnant,” she said. “Everything smells horrible. At least I’m not throwing up every ten minutes.”
“Congratulations.”
She moaned unhappily.
“You can congratulate us after the baby is here. Her first few months of pregnancy are always miserable. She’s uncomfortable, she’s tired, and last time, she was constantly throwing up.”
“So you have kids at home?” I asked.
“This was our anniversary getaway. Our boys are home with my mother. She will be thrilled and think I got knocked up on vacation,” the wife said. “I’m probably a month or so along at this point. After all, there’s really no way of knowing until the body decides to make it known.”
“You haven’t taken a pregnancy test yet?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized it was a completely inappropriate question.
Fortunately, she didn’t seem to be bothered by my nosiness and shook her head.
“Not yet, but I don’t need one. I recognize all the symptoms.”
I finished checking them out and congratulated them again anyway as they left.
I thought about what the woman said about how she’d already been pregnant for a while before her symptoms really kicked in, and then she knew for certain. I couldn’t stop thinking about how she had described her symptoms.
Was there any way of knowing if that was what was going on with me? I wasn’t going to need to go to the doctor if I could go grab one of those cheap drugstore home tests. I needed to go shopping anyway, so why not add that to my list? If I took the test and it came out negative, I could tell the doctor I definitely wasn’t pregnant when I made an appointment because I kept throwing up.
The joke was on me that afternoon. I went shopping and purchased a pregnancy test, and after stressing about taking it for another few hours, I finally did. My expectation was that it would be negative. Except that two little purple lines indicating that I was definitely pregnant showed up.
I sat on my bed and stared at the positive results on the test stick. What the hell was I going to do now? I had no way of contacting Miles. He never did fill out the visitor registry completely the last time he was here. And he didn’t register at all this time. How was I supposed to contact him and let him know what was going on?
I was completely overwhelmed. What would I do now? I had a historical registry of local buildings to help manage. I had to keep the inn in business. I had to face the reality that the man of my dreams wasn’t even in a long-distance relationship with me. I was just a convenient local hook-up for him.
I was pretty sure I had messed everything up big time.
Evie was going to be so very disappointed in me. I really didn’t know how I was going to tell my best friend.