The Child Who Changed Them Read online

  But she couldn’t.

  Chapter Four

  By Friday after their morning meeting, Greg was fully convinced that she truly believed he was the father of her child.

  And while he wished wholeheartedly that the possibility existed for him to be a father, he knew that them having a child together wasn’t the reality.

  He knew he was in the clear. For her...he ached a bit. The fact that she so badly needed him to be the father that she couldn’t even entertain another option told him that whoever had fathered her child wasn’t someone she could fathom, or allow, as the father.

  And also strictly for her, he worried a bit, too. What would the ramifications be for her when she realized that what she’d apparently mentally denied as impossible had become reality?

  It was none of his business. He was perfectly clear on that point.

  They were work associates, members of the charting committee, past lovers—only. They’d never been intimate friends, the kind you told your problems to, or turned to when you were at one of life’s low points. He’d never really had—or been—one of those. He knew a lot of people. Hung with various groups of people—his golf buddies who were mostly financiers and lived in Nevada. He’d lived and practiced there before accepting the temporary position at Marie Cove as he made the move from internist to full-time ER doctor. And he was still in touch with a group of doctors he’d known since med school—male and female—who usually got together in Vegas at least once a year. And in Marie Cove, there was a newer group of younger guys who were teaching him to surf.

  For emotional intimacies, there’d been Heather, the summer after he’d graduated high school. At least he’d been emotionally intimate in that one.

  And his ex-wife, Wendy...for a time it had felt as though they’d merged two sets of wants and needs, goals, and hearts and souls into one life. It wasn’t until after the relationship ended, and he saw how little of his private self he left behind with her, that he realized how much of an emotional loner he’d become.

  And then there was Elaina. Had been Elaina...though he’d never really been emotionally intimate with her.

  He’d been ready to make a life with her, though. Wow, had he been off on that one. Thankfully, she’d said her piece first, breaking up with him before he’d suggested furthering their intimacy. Saved him a load of embarrassment.

  Not that it mattered in his current world at all. He’d already given up the lease on his apartment. Had turned down the full-time ER appointment at Marie Cove and sent his letter of acceptance for the position in LA—all that morning.

  While he was in his office that afternoon after his shift, waiting for Elaina to arrive, he did an internet search on Dr. Cheryl Miller, the doctor Elaina had mentioned. Dr. Miller would know that he’d been involved with Elaina, that she was claiming him as the father of her child. And he wanted to know a bit more about the woman who’d have that information.

  The medical world, while huge, was also small when it came to people who knew people.

  And what he found—that Dr. Miller worked full-time at The Parent Portal, a renowned fertility clinic right there in Marie Cove—gave him pause for concern. Why would Elaina be seeing a fertility specialist?

  Was it actually possible that she’d been accidentally fertilized by mistake, thinking she’d only been undergoing a preliminary exam?

  The idea was ludicrous. Something for a TV show.

  But stranger things had happened, too.

  Medical mistakes happened.

  He knew that firsthand. Had almost lost his license to practice medicine because of one. Not his own, but in the moment, that hadn’t mattered. He’d been suspected at first, had even doubted himself. Could have even been looking at jail. At the time, though, when his patient—a woman close to his own age—had died, a prison sentence had been the least of his concerns.

  Now his concern was in ensuring that if something had gone awry with Brooklyn’s medication on Monday, they found out what and who was responsible. He was not going to lose another patient due to a medical mistake.

  And he wasn’t leaving Marie Cove until the mystery was solved. He’d given a month’s notice to both hospitals. That gave him thirty days to wrap up the threads of the brief life he’d led in the quaint, upscale beach town.

  The knock at that precise moment seemed purposeful to him. As though someone was trying to tell him that Elaina was one of those threads that needed wrapping.

  She entered, looking as exquisitely beautiful as always, carrying her tablet with her. Anytime he’d ever been out with her, he’d noticed other men’s heads turn as she passed. She didn’t ask for it, didn’t seem to even be aware, it just happened. The ponytail she always wore at work was as pristine as it had been that morning, and incurred visions of that long dark luxurious hair spread over him, and under him, too, splayed across the pillow. Her features, cheekbones that were unique and yet softly rounded, eyes that seemed to entice him into their pool-like depths and lips that were full and sweet and could do the most incredibly seductive things to a man’s body...

  “I’ve been over admissions from Monday and have a listing of all personnel who charted in the ED...” They were privy to these records as part of their commission on the charting committee. He wasn’t surprised she’d done work ahead of their meeting. Elaina always came prepared. And carried more than her share of the load.

  Taking her cue—and appreciative of it—he resolved to get right to work. He sat beside her with his own tablet as they designed a plan for divvying up patients and charts based on types of procedures, figured out the easiest way to seek out the data and designed a shareable spreadsheet for the two of them to use for documentation.

  And in less than an hour they’d completed their work.

  “Can you have your part done by tomorrow afternoon?” he asked as they both stood, pushing their chairs back underneath the table simultaneously.

  Whether on the dance floor, in bed or at a worktable, they’d always been perfectly in sync. The thought crossed his mind and he batted it out of the ballpark.

  “I can.” Holding her tablet to the chest of her blue scrubs, she headed to the door before glancing over her shoulder to ask, “You want to meet here again then? Same time?”

  He wanted to take her in his arms. Hold her while her life was imploding.

  Recognizing that he did her an injustice with the assumption that it would implode. But he knew he couldn’t possibly be the father of her child, and her adamant insistence that he was set her up for a shock that would rock her, at the very least.

  “I’m infertile.” He blurted the words. Like the nerd he’d once been.

  Turning, one slow step at a time, she stared at him, mouth open.

  Yeah. He watched her expression, trying to figure out what she was thinking, what way she was going to go, to help her deal with the ramifications if he could. A farewell gesture between coworkers with fringe benefits.

  When she didn’t say anything, he stepped up to fill the gap. “I looked up your ob-gyn and saw that she works at The Parent Portal.”

  She continued to stare at him.

  “A fertility clinic,” he added, as though speaking to someone who might not be following his conversation.

  “I’m infertile,” he repeated. He’d never just outed his infertility before. And there he’d done it twice.

  Based on the wide-eyed look she still wore, she couldn’t seem to grasp the information—not even the second time.

  “Don’t lie to me, Greg,” she finally said. “Say you don’t want a child, or don’t want one with me. Tell me you don’t ever want to be a father, fine. I already told you I’m fine to not even name you on the certificate. Just, please, don’t lie to me.” With that she turned and headed toward the door.

  He could let her go. He’d done enough. And had his own demons to deal with.

  “You want me to have the reports from the three separate fertility clinics I visited in Nevada sent to Cheryl Miller?” The question came anyway.

  Even more slowly than before, she turned back to him, sliding around rather than stepping, her black foam-padded shoes seeming to stick on the carpet. Funny of him to notice the innocuous when he was forcing a woman to see something she most certainly could not seem to comprehend.

  She appeared to be at a loss for words. At least she wasn’t hurling insults, calling him names.

  “Why were you visiting The Parent Portal?” he asked then, gently.

  He could not possibly be the biological father of her child, not after having held on to hope as long as he could. For more years than his marriage had lasted. After the third round of tests in six years, he’d finally accepted that which wasn’t going to change.

  No way he could let her problem send him backward to revisit something he’d already dealt with.

  “How many visits have you made there?” he asked. His first question had received no response, but she was still standing there, facing him, not the door. If yesterday’s visit had been the first, he could definitively rule out wrongful fertilization.

  Maybe, if he hadn’t been through a nightmare of his own where a wrongful act had impacted one of his patients, he wouldn’t be so quick to think it could happen.

  “Have you been seeing Dr. Miller long?” He phrased his question a third way.

  “Six months.”

  Six months. She’d been visiting a fertility clinic while they’d still been lovers?

  He’d had no idea.

  How did a woman sleep with a guy and not tell him that she was investigating her options for having a baby?

 
He felt his own mouth drop open now, as he stared. Completely...he wasn’t even sure what. Angry, now, for sure.

  Had he known her at all?

  “We didn’t talk about such things, Greg.”

  Her pragmatic tone, filled with a bit of...warmth, brought him back to his senses. She was right. They’d been coworkers with benefits. He’d once considered them friends with benefits. Before he’d realized that they’d never even shared details of their lives.

  “You’ve been planning to have a child.”

  So much for his sympathy for finding herself unexpectedly pregnant. She wanted to be pregnant.

  He’d been having sex with her and he hadn’t known that she wanted to be.

  Had he not been sterile, would she have...

  “Were you using me to get pregnant?” The words flew up and out of him before he’d thought them through.

  She didn’t flinch. Didn’t even frown. Looking him straight in the eye, she said, “No.” And then followed it up with another kick in the pants. “I’ve been preparing to have myself fertilized with Peter’s sperm. He did his residency at the clinic, and like many of his peers back then, had donated sperm. I’m supposed to be having his baby. Yesterday’s exam was the final check before insemination.”

  Tears came to her eyes as the words trailed off and Greg felt sick. Stunned. Hurt. And sad for her all at the same time.

  She’d been sleeping with him, and while he was preparing to ask her to take their relationship to another level, she’d been actively pursuing having another man’s baby.

  Not just another man. She’d been planning to have a baby by the man who’d been the love of her life.

  Not that she’d ever talked to him about Peter. But others had. They’d been the golden couple of Oceanfront.

  Either way, Elaina had been happily married to a man who’d died tragically. And was still trying, all these years later, to have his baby.

  If that didn’t say “love of your life,” nothing did.

  He was nothing to her. Owed her nothing. How she got pregnant wasn’t his concern. He knew it wasn’t by him.

  Greg moved to the door of his office, opening it like an automaton. “Is tomorrow afternoon, same time, good for you to go over my results?” he asked as though they’d just stood up from the table and hadn’t already decided the point.

  They’d made an unfortunate detour off their professional courses. A mistake he wouldn’t be making again.

  “Of course,” she said, heading to the door.

  But before it closed behind her, she poked her head back inside. “You’re the only man I’ve slept with in a couple of years, Greg. This baby is yours.”

  It wasn’t. But arguing the point with her was useless.

  Instead, Greg waited to give Elaina a head start, and then walked out of his office, out of the hospital, and drove out of town. He drove for anonymity. To clear his head. And to stop in the first semilarge town between Marie Cove and LA—Mission Viejo—to pick up a home male fertility test.

  He knew the results before he left the drugstore. Before he got back to his apartment. Before he did what he had to do to produce semen for the test.

  And when those results came back exactly as he’d known they would, he felt tears prick the backs of his eyes, too.

  They didn’t fall. He wouldn’t let them fall.

  A guy couldn’t cry for something he’d already lost.

  Chapter Five

  Elaina wasn’t on call that weekend and spent a good bit of Saturday at her office on the hospital campus, filling out portions of the spreadsheet she and Greg had made the day before. Earlier, she’d called Cassie, telling her that she didn’t want to go to the comedy club they’d planned to attend.

  She assured her sister-in-law that she was fine, just that she had a situation at work—something Wood and now Cassie were very used to from her. Her work came first. Always.

  Well...until eight months from now. For the first time since Peter died, she’d have a person in her life who would come before work.

  When Wood called just as she was heading to Greg’s office on Saturday afternoon, she told him the same thing.

  “I’m fine, Wood. You know me.” And maybe he was the only person on earth who really did know her.

  “Cassie says you haven’t said a word about Thursday’s appointment.”

  “It went fine,” she said, slowing her steps to a standstill in an empty alcove off the mostly deserted Imaging hallway. “I’m definitely a candidate to be a mother. In every way.”

  She couldn’t tell him she was pregnant yet. She hadn’t accepted the news herself, though when she did actually think about it, she felt an elation she didn’t recognize.

  Even more than the burst of wonderful feeling and kind of ownership love she felt every single time she was around Wood and Cassie’s little Alan. Her godson. The eleven-month-old owned her heart like no one ever had before.

  “So...that’s good, right?” Wood asked. That was so...him. Taking things at face value. Drawing no nuances or reading between lines.

  “Yes, it’s fabulous,” she said, smiling as she placed a hand on her stomach. And it would be something she could talk about once the baby’s father understood that he’d produced a child.

  It just didn’t seem right to bring the situation to light until Greg had a chance to assimilate the truth.

  “You’re sure you want to do this, Elaina? You don’t want to wait a bit? See if you meet someone, fall in love again...”

  Wood had been hesitant about her using Peter’s sperm from the beginning.

  “Absolutely sure.”

  Even if the clinic had made a mistake and injected her by accident—though the chances of that were so slim she couldn’t seriously consider the possibility—she was still in shock over Greg’s announcement, but had to believe that his tests were wrong. Maybe another reason she was reticent to tell Cassie and Wood what she’d found out the day before. When Greg had first demanded a paternity test, she’d hated that he was the father of her baby.

  By that morning, she’d had to admit that she didn’t hate him as the father, though she hated the circumstances they were in. Not that she wanted to start something up with him. She did not. Something else that would be hard to get Wood to understand. She had to do this alone.

  But Greg was a good man. A great doctor and, really, a wonderful person. And didn’t deserve to be sterile.

  Any child would be lucky to carry his genes. Her heart ached for the pain he’d tried so hard not to show, pretending that he was okay with his situation, that he’d adjusted. She’d seen the shadows in his eyes and had known that he one hundred percent believed what he’d told her. And that he suffered from the knowledge.

  “So...you’re okay?” Wood asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re going to do this? You’re going to have a baby?”

  “Yes, I am.” She couldn’t help the bit of elation that came out in her tone. She might not yet fully comprehend everything that had changed in her life, might not be ready to start thinking about actually being pregnant, but the fact was slowly finding a home within her.

  After offering her his and Cassie’s support in whatever way she needed it, Wood rang off. The best brother a girl could ever hope to have—even if he was really just an ex-brother-in-law, husband in name only, and then “adopted” brother.

  She had to double-time it to make it to Greg’s office on time, so she did. Thinking about the man with every quick step. As she’d been doing since the afternoon before.

  Greg wasn’t asking for a paternity test because he didn’t trust her. He was asking because he’d been put in a position where he had no choice.

  The man actually believed himself to be infertile! How could she not have known that? All those months they’d been lovers...

  But then, she’d never talked to him about Peter. Or much about Wood, either, for that matter. She’d shrugged and said nothing. Not even the day Wood had come to see her at the hospital and found her having lunch with Greg in the cafeteria.