The Child Who Changed Them (Parent Portal 5)

That wasn’t the plan.

And it wasn’t fair.

Not to the baby.

Not to the baby’s father...

Oh, God.

Oh, God. Oh, God.

“Are you in a relationship with the father?”

A quaint way of handling the hugely awkward situation, she supposed. Peter, as a resident, had worked with Cheryl. Not that anyone would blame her for getting on with her life. Peter had been gone a long time.

“I’m not in a relationship with anyone,” Elaina quickly blurted.

What?

Oh, God. It wasn’t happening.

Wasn’t supposed to happen that way.

The whole plan...the self-realizations...the move from being reliant to self-reliant...from using a man for her own emotional security—even at the risk of that man’s happiness—to standing on her own and giving back to those who’d given to her.

To Wood.

Cassie’s husband.

Elaina’s own ex-husband.

Dr. Miller was studying her with a look of concern. Not that Elaina blamed her. She’d be doing the same if she were on the doctor’s stool rather than the chair she occupied. Hell, she was doing it even in the chair she occupied. Watching herself fall apart.

“I had relations...a friends-with-benefits thing...but I broke that off...”

“Does he know about your plans to be inseminated with Peter’s sperm?”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t even know I want to have a baby. We weren’t...that kind of close...”

Greg had made her laugh out loud. Something Elaina wasn’t prone to doing. He’d given her moments of freedom from everything she expected of herself. Freedom from grief.

She’d used him. Just like she’d used Wood for emotional companionship after Peter’s death.

Unintentionally. Unknowingly. Until he’d met Cassie and she’d slowly begun to see the truth about herself.

But that didn’t change the facts.

“He... I didn’t really talk about Peter...we weren’t...” That kind of close. “He knew about him,” she hastened to add to the tail end of her unfinished previous sentence. “Knew that Peter had just gotten his license to practice, and that he was killed by a drunk driver. He knew that I was in the car...and seriously hurt...but about his sperm being frozen...” She shook her head.

They weren’t that kind of close.

The words just kept repeating themselves in Elaina’s head, as though their truth could put a stop to the madness.

To turn events back to the way they were supposed to go.

She couldn’t be pregnant. Most certainly not with Greg Adams’s baby. He wasn’t even a permanent hire—would probably be leaving town as soon as he found a job at a bigger hospital.

“Forgive me for asking, but is he married?”