Chapter 17
KAT
Kat picked up Dolly the following day. They moved the goats in with the lambs, so Dolly could have her very own pen to start.
She had fresh hay, fresh water, and Kat spent too much time petting her.
But there was still a lot of work to be done.
The interiors of the guest cabins still needed to be decorated.
She’d already purchased furniture, artwork, and decorative objects to go in each one.
Most of it was on the cheaper side, which meant the furniture needed to be assembled after she brought it home.
Every day, she told herself to push through just one more day. As soon as the cabins were ready, she could slow down a bit. And then, when Charlie started, things would be more manageable for her. For now, Kat had to keep going, one hour at a time.
She was just screwing together a couch with a hex key when she started to feel dizzy again.
“Shoot,” she said to herself. She’d thought it was maybe indigestion from something she’d eaten, but apparently, it was an actual bug.
Ten minutes later, she had to run to the toilet.
She tried taking something for the nausea, and that seemed to work for a while. But eventually, it came back.
The next day she told Tony she might have to take it a bit easy.
As much as she wanted to get everything done as soon as possible, it was likely overwork that made her get sick in the first place.
She’d been staying up late and getting up early, working harder throughout the day, and skipping meals.
She was a walking, talking petri dish, just waiting for the right virus to come along, and apparently, it had.
“I probably caught something at the store,” she said to Tony. “I’m going to turn in early tonight and see if I feel better in the morning.”
“Sleep in, too,” Tony insisted. “I’ll take care of the horses.”
“Thanks, Tony. You’re a real one.” She gave him an air-high-five from a distance. “Sorry. I don’t know if I’m contagious.”
“Thanks for caring about me,” he said.
She grinned and winked. “Maybe I just care about the ranch, and you’re my only hand.”
“Now, now,” he said. “I know you better than that. Get some rest.”
That night, she ate some chicken soup and drank ginger tea, hoping it would help.
Then she took more medicine and went to bed early.
She set the alarm on her phone for seven in the morning instead of five, which was when she’d been getting up lately to make up for the lack of Cole. She didn’t wake up until nine.
Kat leapt out of bed the next morning, shouting, “Oh, no! How did I oversleep so much?” She ran around the cabin like the smoke alarm had gone off and she couldn’t find the fire.
She felt terrible. Tony had been out there making up for her laziness, and he was coming off a recent injury. She was the worst boss ever.
As soon as she was dressed, she ran outside to find him. He was already cleaning up the goats’ enclosure. “Tony! I’m so sorry I overslept. I feel awful. Please, tell me what still needs doing, and I’m on it.”
“Don’t you worry about it, kid. I’ve got everything handled. You just look after yourself and get better.” He kept working, and she kept feeling awful.
“Promise you won’t re-injure your back.”
“I’m being careful,” he said. “I’ve thrown my back out before, so I know what I’m doing. Don’t you worry about this old man. Why don’t you take the day off?”
“Oh, no. I don’t think so.” The very idea of taking a day off when she was so close to finishing everything made her more frustrated than getting sick in the first place. “You know what? I’m actually feeling a lot better this morning. I think it might have been a twenty-four-hour bug.”
“Well, that’s good to hear,” Tony said, patting the heads of both goats, who had come up to get some attention.
“Those goats sure do love you,” Kat said. “You must be a good caretaker.”
“They’re my old buddies. Been around for years. They’ve been missing your uncle a bit, so I give them a little extra attention.” He leaned on his rake and smiled. “Why don’t you go spend a little quality time with Dolly? She’s been a bit homesick.”
“How can you tell?” Kat asked.
“Ah, when you’ve been around ’em long enough, you can see the signs.” He shook his head. “People are even more obvious, which is why I know you’re lying about feeling better this morning.”
“Ah…” Kat blushed after being caught in a lie.
She’d wanted to be able to help out without being a burden to anyone, but Tony had called her out.
She wished he hadn’t. He could have at least pretended to believe her.
“I’ll go say hello to Dolly.” At least he’d given her the excuse she needed to leave before she embarrassed herself further.
She went to Dolly’s enclosure, and the donkey came running up to her like a dog who was excited to see her owner after a long day of being away from home.
The sounds she made as she bounded toward Kat were loud and kind of delightful.
“Hello there, Miss Dolly,” Kat said. “I guess you actually like me.”
Dolly nuzzled against her, and Kat was shocked she’d managed to win her over so quickly.
She had to wonder why, but whatever it was, she supposed it was a good thing.
Dolly brayed and nuzzled her hand again.
Kat gave in and pet her some more. “You are super cute,” she said. “Let me get you some treats.”
She went back to her cabin and opened the fridge in search of some produce that was safe for donkeys to eat.
The apples were easy enough to core and cut, but the second she cut into a carrot, her stomach started to churn.
The smell of it made her feel even sicker than she had the day before.
And she liked carrots! Once again, she had to run to the bathroom.
When she returned to Dolly’s enclosure, she put the cut-up treats into a feed bucket and offered it to her.
“Enjoy, cutie,” she said. Then, she told Tony she was going to take his advice and rest as much as she could for the rest of the day.
Kat spent the next couple days recuperating from what she assumed was a stomach bug.
Every morning, she decided she felt better and tried to work, but then in the afternoon, she would get sick again.
After a week, she started to worry. Maybe this wasn’t only a stomach bug or a cold or whatever.
What if it was something worse? She decided it was past time to go to a clinic.
At the very least, they could give her some stronger medicine than she had at home so she could get back to work.
Every day that passed without her having accomplished the things that needed to be accomplished before she could open her doors to guests gave her increasing anxiety.
The ranch was not lucrative yet. She was bleeding money just to keep the animals fed.
Of course, she knew most businesses were not profitable in their first year, and she had budgeted for it, but she felt like she was using up that budget a little at a time for every day she lost.
“I will not lose this business to a stupid stomach flu,” she muttered to herself.
On her way out, she told Tony that she was headed to the clinic.
“Good,” he said. “I was wondering when you were going to do what needed to be done.”
“Are you calling me inefficient?” She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Sure am,” he said, laughing. “Denial is always inefficient, and you were in some deep denial about being sick.”
“Oh, fine.” She pouted. “I’ll be back soon… hopefully.”
He waved with his back turned, already back to work.
Tony really was probably the hardest worker she’d ever known.
And he didn’t even seem to be doing it for her.
He seemed to be motivated by the animals.
He did the work for them. It was sweet when she thought about it.
And then for no reason at all, she missed Cole and had to pull over and cry like a baby for ten minutes before she could drive again.
Breaking down for no reason was another thing that seemed to be happening more than usual, which she attributed to being exhausted from work and sickness, and it was finally getting to her. That was explanation enough, of course.
The clinic in town was tiny and dated. She didn’t think it had been updated since she was a kid.
It brought back memories of coming here when she was a kid and had broken her little finger on the playground.
It brought back a flood of memories, very few of them good.
But the one thing they all had in common was that someone was taking care of her.
She signed in and sat down, pulling out her phone to read the latest e-book on caring for livestock she’d checked out from her local library. Seconds after she highlighted a helpful excerpt and took a few notes on a notepad, they called her name.
In the exam room, a middle-aged woman took her temperature and blood pressure. “Well, you don’t have a fever,” she said. “And your BP looks great.” She pulled out a little plastic cup and handed it to Kat. “Next…”
Kat didn’t need to be told what this was. “Oh, no. No, there’s no way I’m pregnant.”
“Are you sexually active?”
Kat didn’t answer.
“Did you use any kind of birth control?”
Kat stared down at her lap.
The nurse smiled. “Honey, you’ve been feeling nauseated, and you don’t have a fever. If there’s even the slightest chance.”
She sounded like Kat’s mother, which was almost comforting, but Kat’s mind wouldn’t stop spinning. There was no way she was pregnant. No way. “But I’m not getting sick in the mornings,” she said as a last-ditch denial. “It’s usually in the afternoon.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said the nurse, putting away her instruments. “It’s just called morning sickness. It can happen at any time of the day. Anyway, even if you were on birth control, we’d make you take the test. It’s protocol, just a precaution. You understand.”
Kat trudged to the bathroom like she was wearing weights on both her feet.
Pregnant? Not possible. But it was, and she knew it.
Still, she didn’t feel pregnant. But what did being pregnant feel like, anyway?
She’d never been pregnant before, so how was she supposed to know what it felt like? “I can’t be pregnant,” she said.
It had to come out negative. It was definitely going to come out negative.
This was just a precaution anyway. Surely, if she was pregnant, there would be some other sign.
Wasn’t she supposed to start “glowing” or something like that?
She didn’t look especially brilliant in the mirror.
Tony hadn’t said anything. No, she was definitely not pregnant.
But deep down, she knew the possibility was real.
She took the test and left the cup in the little pass-through, and then she went back to the exam room to wait.
The wait felt like years. She tried to read her book, but there was no chance she could concentrate now.
She just kept yelling at herself in her head.
Why hadn’t she thought of pregnancy before?
Why wasn’t it even in her head as a possibility?
When the nurse returned, the half-smug, half-sympathetic look on her face told Kat everything she needed to know. Even when the nurse said, “I have good news,” Kat knew what was coming next. “You’re not sick. You’re pregnant.”
Kat thanked the nurse in a daze. She walked out of the clinic, still in a daze, and drove home like an actual zombie.
She was in shock. Pregnant? Impossible. Her life was not going to allow for something like that right now.
She had too much that still needed to be done, too many tasks and too few people to do them.
She had a business to get off the ground, a social media platform to build, and animals to care for.
How was she going to take care of a baby?
She parked the truck and wandered past Tony without saying a word. He called after her, “Did you get a diagnosis?”
Some deeply buried, instinctive part of her answered back with a fake carefree smile. “Yep! It’s a whole lotta nothing. I just need a little rest.”
“OK, kid. Take care of yourself.” He waved and watched her walk back to the cabin before going back to work. She had no idea whether he doubted her lie, but at this point, it didn’t really matter. A pregnancy wasn’t something you could hide for long. Eventually, he was going to know.
She went to her room and lay down to come up with a game plan, but she ended up staring at the ceiling.
What had happened to her? Kat was always the woman people went to in a crisis, no matter what it was.
There wasn’t a crisis she couldn’t at least come up with a game plan for.
Even if one of her work friends came to her with this exact issue, she’d have a list of potential avenues to take and pros and cons for each one.
Why couldn’t she seem to do this for herself?
Right now, if Cole told her she looked like a lost kitten, she would not have argued with him. Because that was exactly how she felt.
And then she thought of Cole. What would she do if he were here?
Would she tell him? Would he sit with her and come up with a plan of action, or would he run the way he had just done?
She missed him, but she talked herself out of it.
Chances were, he would run. He was not the right person to have gotten into this situation with.
After having that thought, she realized the flaw in her thinking.
She wasn’t in this situation with him, not at all.
He was gone, and she was in this situation alone.
She pulled the covers over her head and screamed through her teeth at the man who had abandoned her with barely an explanation in the goodbye note he had written on the back of an old feed-store receipt.
Maybe he felt right running away from the authorities the way he had.
Maybe he had convinced himself he was protecting her by leaving.
But with this new information, could he really feel the same?
Would he have run if he’d known? She wanted to doubt it, but part of her was angry enough to believe he would.
He hadn’t turned out to be the man she thought he was.
So, why did she expect him to do the right thing in this case?
Either way, giving him a choice was the right thing to do.
She picked up her phone, thinking she’d send him a quick text asking to meet somewhere.
If she told him it was an emergency, maybe he’d be willing to take that risk.
Then she could tell him her situation and ask him what he’d like to do.
Get the answer straight from him, so she wasn’t guessing in an emotional state.
But when she went to her contacts to find him and send him the message, she realized she had permanently deleted him from her phone.