It was her rage, the quick rush of her emotions moving her features and how quickly she blinked, as though she was fighting the urge to cry that had my anger dimming. “Aly…”

“Non, modi, Ransom I’m done.” I let her shove me again before she stepped back, head shaking like she couldn’t believe she’d let me get under her skin. “I am so done with this bullshit. You want me, you don’t want me, you need me, you don’t need anybody and you say I move fast? You wanna talk about all the girls you’ve serviced?” I started to leave, walked to the door, but Aly jerked me around. “What? Was I too much for you? Did I not stick to your rules? Guess I did, you knew my name. That broke rule number one, right?”

I had no idea what she’d heard about me and was sick that she knew just how I’d managed to get through the noise and guilt in my head. I was embarrassed, I was ashamed, but my jacked up pride wouldn’t give in to that. Instead, Aly knowing what I’d done, precisely what I’d done, only pissed me off.

“Yes, you fucking did!”

I wanted to kiss her and shake her at the same time, and from the way she pushed against my hold when I grabbed her arms, I knew she probably had the same contradictory feelings.

“Ransom! Ransom!” Leann’s voice was panicked, loud and broke the anger heating the room as she screamed at me.

We both turned, out of breath, as Leann ran into the dressing room, her cell clamped between her fingers. “Get to Lakeview,” my cousin said, her eyes somewhat wild although it was obvious she was trying to stay in control. “Keira’s on her way to the hospital. The baby’s coming and it’s…something isn’t right.” I started to move but Leann stopped me. “Take Aly with you. Kona needs you both.”

23

If there hadn’t been worry, Aly’s attitude might have bugged me more than it did. But there was worry, a lot of it as we sped down the interstate in my Mustang. Leann had no real details, only mentioned her husband Will picking up Koa from the neighbors and that my parents had left the lake house in an ambulance.

Dad wouldn’t answer his cell, so that worry I felt when we left the recital had clotted into something tangible, something that felt much more like panic by the time Aly and I parked and ran through the large, dome-shaped awning of the hospital’s main entrance.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any information for you. She was taken in for an emergency C-section. That’s all I know, sugar.” The woman behind that long, wooden desk wasn’t a nurse. The badge hanging from a turquoise lanyard around her neck told me as much.

Elizabeth Dunning, Welcome Desk Hostess.

That had to be the stupidest job title I’d ever heard of, but then at the time, I wasn’t thinking about help that wasn’t helpful. I could only worry about my mother.

Luckily, Aly wasn’t the sort to wait on someone else to get her where she wanted to be. I damn sure hadn’t had experience with that, so it was Aly that walked away from that desk and Mrs. Dunning’s forced, plastic-looking smile, guiding me to the maternity ward waiting area.

The No Entrance sign was a glaring reminder that something out of my control was happening to my family beyond those swinging metal doors. There was no window, no way for us to access a doctor who could give us an update or slip inside to find Kona and find out what the hell was going on with my mother.

“This is bullshit,” I muttered when we waited in front of that No Entrance sign like two kids helpless without adult supervision.

“There’s nothing we can do right now,” Aly said and even though she made sense, even though she probably thought she was being helpful, I hated her, just a little bit.

“You don’t think I know that?”

My voice was loud enough, sharp enough to grab the attention of the people in the waiting room with anxious smiles on their faces. They were a collection of older folks with gray/blue hair huddled next to each other, worried looking fathers and mothers who kept eyeing those metal doors and other people who were likely aunts, friends, and siblings that seemed impatient but still excited.

My shout had removed the easy smiles from their faces and, I noticed as I slumped into a faux wooden chair with stain-guarded red fabric, had only irritated Aly further.

She didn’t sit right next to me, but did join me on the same row of chairs—the one facing those damn metal doors.

“Losing your temper isn’t going to help.” She said that with her face turned away from me and her legs crossed. When she started shaking her foot like the small action was the only thing keeping her attention divided enough so she wouldn’t smack me, I rested against the back of the chair, breathing in deep. I needed to rein in my fear. I needed to not take any damn thing out on Aly.

“It…I don’t know what to do in situations like this.” It was weak to admit, but at least it was honest. I didn’t think Aly appreciated it. Maybe she was just too damn mad at me to care. Either way, the only response I got from her was an increase in that foot shake and her head shaking as she looked out over the wall of windows on the other side of the room. “I’m…I can’t lose her.”

“Why do you do that?” she asked, snapping her attention back to me. “Every damn time something happens that you don’t like, something that scares you, you think the worst. You always think the worst, Ransom.”

I wanted to yell at her. Right then, I wanted to tell Aly she knew nothing about me, that how I was, what I thought, what I fucking felt was something she’d never understand. Something hateful, something stupid and defensive was just on the tip of my tongue, but Aly must have seen it coming in the tight grind of my jaw because she stood up then, glaring down at me like I was a damn idiot.

“You ever think once in your selfish little life, Ransom Riley-Hale that all the bad that happens, all the weight you have holding you back is self-inflicted?”

“How the hell is this,” I wave my hand back toward the metal doors behind me, “self-inflicted?”

“You get back what you put out in the universe.” She stepped so close then that I could just make out the small flecks of green growing darkening her eyes. “You get it back, Ransom and you don’t even know it. All that guilt, all that shame, all that fucking pity you feel for yourself, it comes back because you speak it into the ether. Me zanmi, I’ve seen it before.

It always comes back.”

“I didn’t do this!”

Something shifted in her expression when I yelled at her, something that looked like I might not be able to fix, but then the doors behind us flung open and through them came my screaming, fighting father held back by four orderlies that didn’t look nearly strong enough to keep him in the waiting room.

“No! Don’t you fucking dare!” Dad say, pushing back at a tall, but scrawny looking guy in green scrubs.

“Stop,” I told them, moving to Kona’s side as he struggled. “Dad, please. What the hell is going on?”

My father was the strongest man I knew. He was power and strength, he always seemed in control and ready to tackle anything that came at him. But just then, as Aly and I managed to move him from the doors without his doing any harm to himself or the orderlies who ran back through the doors, my father looked completely lost.

It took him a second to get his breathing under control and he let Aly sit next to him, holding onto his arm as he scrubbed his fingers through his hair, then massaged his neck. Finally, a few more exhales and he looked up at me. His hands didn’t stop shaking.