Gasping, she shot back and put her hands on my stomach. And so it begins, I had about six months left of people randomly touching it. “I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”
Shaking my head, I looked down briefly where she was touching and wondered again if there really was a little baby in there. Fourteen weeks seemed like a long time, shouldn’t I be showing by now? I felt like a fraud.
“I’m so excited and happy that you’re having my grandchild, honey,” she whispered, still crying openly. “Some of the best surprises are the ones that come out of the blue, and this is definitely one of them.”
I blew out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, relieved that she was happy about the baby and not blaming me for trapping her son.
“Has Elijah showed you the photos?” I asked shyly, then almost smacked my head with my hand. Of course he had, he was the one who had them.
“Oh, I’ve seen them, and he’s absolute perfection.” He? I felt like it was a she, did that make me defective? Seeing my expression, Ronnie squeezed my hand. “Right now, it’s fifty-fifty on what the baby is, but so long as they’re healthy, who cares.”
Smiling at her, I glanced at Ari to see that she was tearing up again. I thought I was meant to be the one who cried over everything?
“I also want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for bringing Elijah back to us. That boy—” I snorted internally at her calling him a boy “—hasn’t been the same since we lost Cooper. I know part of it was grief, but I also know that his parents blaming him for it and throwing it all back in his face was most of why he withdrew from us. They were like parents to him, too, so hearing something like that struck him hard.” Now it all started to make sense. “He wasn’t even allowed to go into the church initially for the funeral, but in the end, they agreed, so long as he sat at the back and left before it was time for them to walk past him.”
“You can’t be serious,” I snapped. “For God’s sake, my mum was killed by a drunk driver, and him being treated like that at her funeral would be understandable. Them treating Elijah—who tried to save their son and ended up saving two other men with a fracture in his spine—like that is inconceivable. By all means, be angry and grieve, but…” I waved my arm in the air, struggling to find the words I was looking for.
I was just so pissed off that all I could think about was hitting them both with my shoe.
Lips twitching, Ronnie nodded in agreement. “Yeah, it was messed up, and it did a lot of damage to Elijah that I didn’t think he’d ever come back from. Now I see he has, and I need to thank you for giving us back our boy.”
“And with the bonus of a grandchild,” Ari added.
“You’ve made miracles happen for us, Sadie. Thank you.”
And that’s when my badass self burst into tears and bawled my heart out on poor Elijah’s mum’s chest. I’d never made anything happen that I was aware of, and now this woman was saying I’d brought life back to Elijah after what he’d been through. And I was carrying a life inside me, too.
“I’ve never been pregnant,” I wailed, not realizing that the shaking chest under me was because she was laughing at the randomness of those four words. “And I’ve never made a miracle happen.”
“I’m thinking that isn’t true,” she whispered into the top of my hair. “I’ve met your family, and I reckon they’d call you a miracle regardless.”
And, fuck me, that just made me cry even harder. When I realized my tears had no intentions of buggering off, I begged Ari to say something to piss me off. Anger always worked perfectly as a countermeasure for tears.
Smiling with glee, she rubbed her hands together. “How much bigger do you think your boobies are going to get? They’re about the same size as a man’s head anyway. Do you think they’ll get double what they are now?”
A mental image of me with boobs like that popped into my head, and I couldn’t hold back the gasp of horror. “You take that back.”
“Can’t,” she shrugged. “And they’re definitely going to get bigger. Imagine what they’ll look like when the milk comes in.”
If Ronnie hadn’t been there, I’d have tackled her to the floor and throttled her. “Take it back,” I hissed. “Or I’ll pop your tits like a balloon.”
“Ah, Christ,” a deep voice groaned from the door, alerting us to the fact that we had company.
All three of us glanced over and saw Elijah’s dad, Wyatt, standing next to him, with Jackson and his brothers behind him.