Second Time's the Charm

“In the middle of sex?”

“No! Of course not.” Focusing on the vivid fuchsia color of a bougainvillea plant in the landscaped front yard they were passing, Lillie thought of her conversation with Jon the night before.

Of the way he’d brushed off everything she had to tell him—shrugged aside all of the signs she’d laid so plainly in front of him. Abe’s focus, he’d said, was just something he’d been born with.

Maybe that was what had made him so adept at lipreading at the age of two.

“I take it he took the news badly?”

“Not really.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“He didn’t believe me.” Glancing at her friend, Lillie looked for Caro’s reaction. Did her friend think she was overreacting, too? Was this really not about Abraham at all?

But about Braydon?

About loving a child. And fearing the worst?

After one weekend in bed with Jon, she was already making Abraham out to be sick. Because she was never going to be able to have another child—love another child—without the constant fear of losing him riding on her back.

Which was why she was never going to have another child. Or marry again, either. Her job was to care for other people’s children so she could keep breathing when diagnoses came back bad.

She pedaled hard.

Caro kept up.

“I spent yesterday afternoon poring over case studies of two-year-olds with hearing loss and Abe has every single one of the symptoms.” As they rode, turned a corner and headed up the opposite block, Lillie listed off the same signs she’d told Jon about the night before.

“Sounds to me like you’re spot-on...” Caro said, drawing out the last word.

“But?”

“It sounds like he could be, too,” she said. “When you put all those things together, they do paint the picture of a child with hearing loss. But, at the same time, each one of those behaviors, by itself, isn’t all that unusual. They could all be explained by the things Jon said.”

“You think I’m wrong, too?”

Coming to a stop sign, Caroline put her foot down to the ground and sat on her bike, waiting for Lillie to do the same. “What’s all this about right and wrong, Lil? I’ve never known you to second-guess yourself where your work is concerned.”

“No one’s right all the time.”

“Of course they aren’t. You’re reminded of that every single day when you go into a room with a sick child.”

They’d had that talk before—about the potential for people who spent their days with sick children to get burned out.

“So why are you beating yourself up over this one? Seems pretty simple to me. Jon gets Abe’s ears tested and you deal with the results.”

“I told you he didn’t believe me.”

“He’s not going to have Abe’s ears tested,” Caroline surmised.

“He just did this summer. He sees no point in putting Abe through the procedure again.”

“And you’re afraid that in the meantime the little guy’s going to lose hearing that he might not be able to regain.”

“Right.”

And she was worried that she was losing her professional grip completely. That she was seeing potential illness where there was none.