For Their Baby. Kathleen O'Brien

That left him…nowhere. Suspended in some murky, slow-motion half-life.

      He wondered if things would snap back into clarity when the results of the paternity test came through.

      Or would life just get weirder still?

      He glanced at the closed door through which the nurse had escorted Kitty at least forty-five minutes ago. Their cheek swabs had been done earlier, when they first got to the office. Now the CVS test was supposed to take no more than half an hour. Had something gone wrong?

      He stood. He paced to the check-in window to see if he could glimpse anything going on down the halls. He couldn’t.

      When he turned back, he saw that a little kid with a runny nose had stolen his chair. In the far corner, a woman who had to be about eleven months pregnant inexplicably burst into tears, and her husband knelt in front of her, apologizing and chafing her hands.

      God. This was the waiting room of one of the most respected and most expensive obstetricians in San Francisco. David could only imagine what it must be like at a free clinic. No wonder Kitty had been so adamant that she wouldn’t go to a cut-rate place.

      He checked his watch. Fifty minutes.

      And then, suddenly, Kitty came through the door. For a second, her small, oval face was pale and oddly woebegone under the chaos of green curls—and then she spotted him. Instantly she rearranged her features into the feisty, chin-up expression he knew best.

      But all the pride in the world couldn’t put the color back into her cheeks.

      “Everything go okay?” He had already paid, days ago, so they had nothing to do but leave. He fought the urge to put his arm around her shoulders. She might be pale, but he knew she’d rather collapse on the carpet than admit any weakness.

      “It was fine.”

      They walked a few feet, and she stumbled over a board book some brat had left by the door. She reached out and used the wall to steady herself.

      “How about if you wait here,” he said, “and I’ll bring my car around?”

      “No, thanks.” The door to the obstetrician’s suite opened just a little way from the elevator, and she punched the down button quickly. “I’m all right. They said to take it easy, but no one said I needed a wheel-chair and a keeper.”

      He wanted to ask her again how the test had gone, but the stiffness in her shoulders told him she wasn’t in the mood to discuss it. At least not with him. Once again that surreal detachment swamped him. How was it possible that he might be having a baby with this woman who wouldn’t even talk to him?

      She spent the ride down adjusting the folds of her cloth purse to avoid making eye contact, as if he were some disreputable stranger who had crowded her and might ask for a handout.

      He tightened his jaw and backed away to lean against the farthest wall of the glass elevator. Fine. If she didn’t want to talk, he knew how to be silent. He put his hands in his pockets and pretended to watch the luxuriant fern and ivy of the atrium slide by.

      When they reached the ground floor, though, and the doors slid soundlessly open to release them, he saw her hesitate, her fingers tightening on the shoulder strap of her purse. And then it hit him. How had she gotten here this morning? And how was she going to get back? Her hotel was halfway across San Francisco, and he had no idea whether she could afford a cab.

      Damn it. He should have picked her up. Or at least sent a cab to get her. He’d promised he’d handle the cost of this test—all the costs. But he hadn’t even thought about transportation. Obviously, he’d been spending way too much time in ivory-tower lawyerland. And she probably despised him for that, probably assumed he had been born to the cushy life and had always been smugly oblivious of details like this.

      Ha. If she only knew.

      “I hope you’ll let me give you a lift back to the hotel.” He smiled, working at sounding politely professional. Nothing judgmental, patronizing or overly familiar.

      He seemed, thank God, to have hit the correct tone. She didn’t smile, exactly, but her face wasn’t as gray and hard as it had been upstairs. A little color had come back into her cheeks.

      “Thank you,” she said. “But I’m fine.”

      “I’d like to.” He thought fast. “And it wouldn’t be out of my way. I have to meet a client over in that part of town, and—”

      “No, really. Thanks, but I’m fine.” She pushed a curl out of her forehead with a tense hand.

      Had a hint of chill returned to her voice? Had she taken “that part of town” as an insult? He hadn’t meant it as one. Her hotel had obviously been chosen to get maximum clean-and-respectable points for minimum price, which seemed like common sense to him.

      He wasn’t a silver-spoon snob; but of course she didn’t know that. All she knew of him was the luxury cottage at the Bahamas, the overdecorated office in Union Square and maybe a glimpse of the Victorian house he’d just bought in the Marina district, which looked okay from the outside but was crumbling to bits on the inside, like a facade for a film set. That moldering interior was partly why his housekeeper stone-walled anyone who came knocking at the door.

      Someday, he’d have to tell Kitty about the two-job, Ramen noodle years of law school. And the loans that had crippled him financially for a decade. And how, now that he’d been fool enough to buy that fading lady of a house, he would have to restore it, plank by plank, with his own time and sweat.

      Someday. Yeah. If the test came back with his name on it, and they actually had a someday.

      Right now, though, he had to get her into the car and back to her hotel so that she could rest. She had dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago.

      “Kitty, I—”

      She shook her head firmly. “I’m not going straight back to the hotel, anyhow. I have an errand to run first. I’m fine with the bus.”

      The bus? A half-hour standing in the cold, waiting for it to rumble by, followed by two hours of bumping and jostling, hanging onto a ceiling strap and nosing the next guy’s armpit?

      “Can’t the errand wait? You really should take it easy and—” But she was already shaking her head again, so he tried another tack. “Tell you what. I’ll take you to do the errand, whatever it is, then drop you back at the hotel. I guarantee we’ll get it all done before the right bus even shows up.”

      He almost had her. Though she probably didn’t know it, a tiny worry line had formed between her eyebrows. He could practically see her willpower fading as she glanced uncertainly toward the front doors. He knew very little about her, but he knew, from the quick bar-side chitchat, customer to bartender, that she was from Virginia.

      He would have known, even if she hadn’t told him. Her accent, with its soft I’s and almost inaudible G’s, spoke of a childhood spent playing under the magnolia trees of the Deep South, not on the foggy hillsides of northern California.

      Besides, even natives occasionally found the public transit system daunting.

      “Kitty.” He put his hand on her shoulder—and almost pulled it away again, shocked to find that his palm instantly recognized the exact shape of the curve, the exact feel of the warm, satiny, sun-bronzed skin. “Let me help. You look done in, and that can’t be good for you—or the baby.”

      He wondered whether she’d say something snarky, something about how charming it was that he suddenly gave a damn about the baby, but she didn’t. Maybe she was too tired.

      She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

      She stood somberly by his side, without chitchat, as he gave his ticket to the medical complex valet. When the car came, she settled herself gingerly, and leaned her forehead against the window for a few seconds, with her eyes closed.

      As