They got up, and Joanna rushed toward the door, while Jeff didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get out. He smiled at Lynn as he passed her, then winked.
“See you next week, Doc.”
She closed the door before he could notice that she blushed.
Chapter 2
“You mean to tell me that Amy has been here the entire time?”
I knelt next to the girl on the floor in the bathroom. The house Christine had taken me to was for sale and abandoned. I pushed away a dead roach lying on its back.
Christine nodded. “Her parents wanted her to get rid of the baby, but she didn’t. So, we brought her here, and she’s been living here the past several months. I’ve been bringing her food and whatever else she needed. But last night she…she started to feel pain, and when I came to see her this morning on my way to school, as usual, she was screaming.”
Amy was sweating and let out a loud groan as another contraction waved through her body.
“Her water broke like half an hour ago, and that’s when I thought I’d come to get you,” Christine said. “I don’t know what to do.”
I stared at the young girl, no more than fifteen. Christine had told me that Amy had gotten pregnant a long time ago, but I had assumed that she had an abortion since I didn’t hear anything else. I knew that was what her parents wanted. I couldn’t believe she had been hiding in this house for months, and Christine had kept this a secret from me.
“What the heck, Christine?” I said. “What was your plan? To have her give birth here? In all this dirt?”
“I…I don’t know,” she said, half crying. “I don’t think…I mean, we…”
Amy let out another loud groan, and I realized she was closer than I had thought. I had to act fast.
“We need to get an ambulance,” I said and grabbed my phone. I looked at Christine. “I’ll deal with you later.”
The ambulance came quickly, but by then, it was too late to move her. The EMTs decided they had to let her have the baby there, and Christine held Amy’s hands as she went into labor right there on the bathroom floor of an abandoned house.
“There you go, Amy. You’ve got this,” I squealed and remembered my own birth just a few weeks earlier. It had gone pretty smoothly and uneventful since it was my fourth child. Amy’s was painful; I could tell, and I truly felt for her. My first birth to Olivia sixteen years ago had lasted thirty-six hours, and even though I did get an epidural, I still felt the pain in a way that made me force Chad to promise me we’d never have any more children. A year later, I had forgotten everything about the pain, clever as the body is, to be able to block out that sort of thing entirely, and we tried again, making Christine.
“That’s it,” the female EMT said. “Push, Amy. Push.”
Amy did, and I watched as the head came first, and then a few seconds later, the EMT was able to pull the baby out with the joyful squeal: “It’s a boy!”
That’s when I broke down in tears for the second time today. The miracle of birth was unlike anything in this world.
“Can I see him?” Amy said, sobbing with happiness. The EMT handed him to her, and her body trembled as she looked down at his beautiful, wrinkled face. Now, we were all crying, even Christine, who simply couldn’t hold it back. I grabbed her and hugged her tightly while we cried together, Christine still holding Amy’s hand in hers.
“He’s so beautiful,” Amy said. “He’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
“He sure is,” I said.
“But now, we need to get you both to the hospital,” the EMT said.
Amy’s eyes grew wide and big. “But…I don’t…I don’t have any insurance.”
“What about your parents?” I asked.
She shook her head. “They won’t…they threw me out.”
That brought a different type of tears to my eyes. I grabbed her by the shoulders and made sure she looked at me while I spoke, “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry, sweetie. You’re not alone. We’ve got you.”
Chapter 3
He saw them from the car as they arrived. He held his breath as they passed him on his street, hurrying toward his townhouse at the end of the cul-de-sac. He watched in the rearview mirror as the three police cruisers parked in his driveway, and seconds later, three officers stormed up on his porch.
Luckily, Scott had a feeling they were coming. He got into his car, then drove down to the end of the road just as they turned the corner of his street. Now, he was at the end of the street; he then took a quick right turn before stepping on it, accelerating down the main road, hoping and praying they didn’t have any of their colleagues on traffic patrol nearby.
Scott felt the sweat tickle his upper lip and wiped it off. This had been a little too close for comfort. He wondered where he could go as he reached the city limits and sped up.
Heart in his throat, he took off toward a friend’s house, then walked up and knocked on the door. Aiden opened the door, then shook his head at him.
“What are you doing here, Scott?” he asked, closing the door behind him and walking out on the porch. His voice was almost a whisper. “You shouldn’t be here. Lisa will kill me if she finds out you’re here.”
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Scott said, keeping his voice low. “The police came to my house. I barely made it out.”
“They’re looking for you everywhere. They even came here and asked all these questions about you and your relationship with Sarah. It got Lisa all worked up. I always knew there was something bad about him, Aiden. Scott has always given me these bad vibes; she kept saying to me. She made me promise that I’d never see you again. You know they think you might have killed Sarah, right?”
Scott swallowed. He suddenly felt so weary.
“I just need somewhere to crash for the night. I’ll be gone in the morning. I can sleep in the garage on that old couch you keep in there. You won’t even know I’m there.”
Aiden gave him a look, then ran a hand frantically through his hair. “You know I would…if it wasn’t for Lisa. I…I’m sorry, old friend. I can’t…she’ll kill me, or even worse, leave me.”
Scott stared at Aiden. They had known each other since college. Was it really so easy to throw away a friendship like this?
“I didn’t do it,” Scott said. “You have to believe me.”
Aiden hesitated. The pause was a little too long for comfort and told Scott exactly how he felt.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Scott said and took a step back. “You don’t even believe me, do you?”
Aiden threw out his arms resignedly. “I…I don’t know what to think, to be honest, Scott. I’m trying to stay out of it and not pick a side here.”
Scott nodded and clicked his tongue. “Well, I guess you just did anyway. It’s good to know who your real friends are.”
He turned around and walked down the steps to the front yard toward the car. Aiden yelled after him, “Scott, don’t be like that…”