Still, she read the results with eyes squinted half shut.
It didn’t change the outcome.
Well, still pregnant, she thought. There was no crying this time, no cursing fate. She simply tucked the stick back in her pocket, opened the door, and prepared to do what needed to be done next. She had to tell Harper.
Why? Why did he have to know? She could go away now, she thought. Pack up and go. The baby was hers.
He was rich, he was powerful. He would take the child and toss her aside. Take her son. For the glory of the
great Harper name he would use her like a vessel, then rip away what grew in her.
He had no right to what was hers. No right to what she carried inside her.
“Hayley.”
“What?” She jolted like a thief, then blinked at Stella.
She was standing among the shade plants, surrounded by hostas green as Ireland. Yards away from the restroom.
How long had she been standing there, thinking thoughts not her own?
“Are you all right?”
“A little turned around.” She drew in a long breath. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’ll make it up. But I need . . . I have to talk to Harper. Before I get started I need to talk to him.”
“In the grafting house. He wanted to know when you got in. Hayley, I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong.”
“I need to talk to Harper first.” Before she lost her nerve, or her mind.
She hurried away, walking quickly between the tables of plants, across the asphalt skirt, past the greenhouses. Business was picking up, she noted, after the high summer slump. Temperatures were easing off, just a little, and made people think about their fall plantings. Stella’s boys were going back to school. Days were getting shorter.
The world didn’t stop just because she had a crisis on her hands.
She hesitated outside of the grafting house, struck by the fact that her mind—so full a moment before—was now a complete blank.
There was only one thing to do, she decided. That was to go in.
The house was warm and full of music. It so well suited him, full of plants in various stages of growth and development, smelling of soil and green.
She didn’t know the music that played, something with harps and flutes. But she knew whatever it was wouldn’t be playing through his headphones.
He was down at the far end, and it seemed like the longest walk of her life. Even when he turned, saw her, and flashed a grin.
“Hey, just who I wanted to see.” He made a come-ahead gesture with one hand as he drew his headset off with the other. “Take a look.”
“At what?”
“Our babies.”
Since he shifted to the plants, he didn’t see her jerk in response. “They’re right on schedule,” he continued. “See, the ovary sections have already swelled.”
“They’re not the only ones,” she mumbled, but moved forward to stand beside him and study the plants they’d grafted a few weeks before.
“See? The pods are fully formed. We give them another three, four weeks for the seeds to ripen. The top’ll split. We’ll gather the seeds, plant them in pots. Keep ’em outdoors, exposed. And in the spring, they’ll germinate. Once they’re about three inches, we’ll plant them out in nursery beds.”