“Meg?” Dylan spoke her name.
Her eyes fluttered open. She took one look at Dylan and burst into tears. He stepped closer and eased into a chair by the bed.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked, sniffling as she pulled away.
“Your neighbor found your cell and called your emergency contact.” He met her gaze. “Let’s start with the most important thing. Are you okay? Is the baby?”
“I’m okay. The baby is too … for now. I’m bleeding, so they have me on bed rest, and they’re monitoring me.”
Olivia’s stomach cramped, and she took a step back, toward the curtain and the exit.
“Thank you for coming.” She glanced at Dylan, then raised her gaze to Olivia, acknowledging her with a grateful smile.
Meg didn’t seem to mind that she was there, but for Olivia, this was all way too close to home.
“What happened?” Dylan asked.
She drew a shuddering breath. “Mike finally called me back. I asked him to come over because we needed to talk. I had to tell him about the baby.”
Dylan nodded. “And?”
“I’m not sure, but he might have been drunk. He definitely was off from the minute he walked in. I just wanted to get it over with, and he just … exploded. He accused me of getting pregnant on purpose to trap him. Which is ridiculous. I mean, he wasn’t someone I wanted to keep and—”
“What did he do?”
Olivia heard the steel beneath the question, the simmering anger.
“He grabbed my wrist, told me that he wasn’t paying a fucking dime.
“I said fine. I didn’t want anything from him anyway. I told him I expected him to sign away any legal rights to the baby.” Meg blinked back tears. “He said I had to prove it was his first.”
What a bastard, Olivia thought. At least Jeff hadn’t questioned paternity. He’d just insisted she get an abortion, she thought, the memory coming back with stabbing, painful clarity. He’d said if she was dumb enough to get pregnant, it wasn’t his problem.
“I told him go to fuck himself,” Meg said.
“Good for you, Meggie,” Dylan said, admiration in his tone.
Olivia agreed, silently applauding her backbone and courage. At nineteen, Olivia hadn’t been confident or strong enough to call Jeff the bastard he’d turned out to be. She’d curled in on herself instead. She swallowed over the lump in her throat.
“And then he … he released my hand and shoved me hard. I stumbled back, tripped, and hit the curio cabinet with all my grandmother’s beautiful antiques.” Her voice cracked, and a lone tear slipped down her cheek. “The glass broke, the pieces fell … and he just walked out.” She swiped at her face with the back of her hand. “I didn’t start bleeding till later. And the doctor said it may have had nothing to do with the fall. That it’s so early in the pregnancy it’s hard to know these things.”
Olivia remembered those words too. It’s hard to know why these things happen, Miss Dare. Sometimes it’s just nature’s way of handling things. God, she hated that Meg was going through this. Hated remembering her own past even more.
“But the doctor said everything might still be okay. I just have to rest. And wait.”
Olivia hadn’t been that fortunate. She’d already lost the baby by the time she’d gotten to the hospital, and they’d had to do a procedure to take care of the rest. She winced at the memory.
“That’s good,” Dylan said, obviously talking about the baby still being okay.
“I want to be a mom,” Meg whispered. “I didn’t know if it would ever be in my plans, but now that I have the chance, I want this,” she said, determination in her tone. “No matter what happens now, I want to make sure the chance doesn’t pass me by just because there’s no Mr. Right.”
“Right now, focus on resting. Everything will fall into place,” Dylan told her.
Meg nodded. “I know.”
Olivia shook her head, her own thoughts spinning because Meg, having gone through her own ordeal, was still thinking about a future, a baby, no matter what happened now. Amazing.
Quietly, knowing nobody would miss her, Olivia backed out of the cubicle and made her way to a small waiting area and settled herself in a chair. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, lost in thought, in Meg’s misery combined with optimism, and in her own past.