The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(17)

I glance at the schedule. There are now three patients shoved into time I blocked off for my nineteen-week exam.

“I’ve got a doctor’s appointment today,” I tell Trinny. “That’s why I blocked it off.”

She looks at me, eyes wide. “Do, uh, you want to tell her?”

My shoulders sag. I already know how that will go…Dr. Fox takes disappointment poorly, to say the least. “I’ll change my appointment.”

But this is going to have to stop. And I’m wondering how I’ll ever gather the courage to tell Dr. Fox why it has to stop when I can’t even ask for a lunch break.





Julie is able to fit me in at the end of the day. I hope her irritation over this is why she’s coming down on me so hard about everything else. “Keeley,” she says, “you’ve put on ten pounds in a week.”

“It’s all gone to my rack, though,” I argue, glancing down. Out of nowhere, I’m suddenly spilling out of every bra I own.

“You’d dropped weight early on and you had some catching up to do,” she says. “It’s just something we’ll need to keep an eye on.”

“I thought we were here to discuss the baby’s health,” I mutter, feeling judged. “Not mine.”

“This is about the baby. A serious spike in weight might be a sign of gestational diabetes. Didn’t you do an obstetrics rotation?”

Various facts pop into my head. Between six and nine percent of pregnancies, excessive thirst and urination might be the only signs. It’s easier to play dumb, though, so I simply shrug.

“Yeah, but I was hooking up with Lowell Chambers at the time. Remember him? Maybe you were gone by then. Anyway, I was in a lust-induced fog, and it all went in one ear and out the other.”

She gives me one of her polite Julie smiles, the kind that say, “I can’t believe this woman and I got the same degree.” I get that look from colleagues quite often, surprisingly.

“Is the father going to be involved?” she asks.

I glance away. “I’m not entirely sure.”

It’s been two days since Graham left and there’s been absolute silence. I assume this means he’s gone back to his soulless and tidy apartment in New York, run the numbers, and written it off.

I’m mostly relieved. Yes, there’s the occasional thought about how fucking easy it is for men to bear none of the consequences, but then I remind myself: I didn’t want him involved and I don’t need his money.

I mostly don’t need his money. Any day now, I’m going to turn into the kind of person who stops buying designer clothing and taking trips to Cabo.

“Well, let’s take another look,” she says, grabbing the jelly for the ultrasound.

My heart beats a little faster. I watch the screen as the transducer glides over my stomach. And then…a profile. A nose, a leg, a tiny, fast-beating heart, flickering in and out like a flashlight in a storm.

My throat tightens unexpectedly.

My child. Something I never thought I’d see.

“The baby is kind of facing away,” Julie says. “I’m going to start doing the measurements and maybe he or she will turn for us here in a second so we can figure out the gender.” A tiny foot comes into view and a flutter in my stomach matches the movement. I want to see more, so badly, and at the same time, I can feel panic bubbling in my chest. I’m not ready for this to be any more real than it already is.

“That’s okay,” I whisper, my throat clogged with tears. “I don’t want to know.”

It’s already too real.

“Keeley,” she says, her voice soft, “you’re probably going to need some help, you know? It’s a lot.”

Which makes me cry the entire way home because she’s right…it’s a lot. And I’m going to be a disaster at it.





Graham calls that evening. I’m tempted to let it go to voice mail until I think of that tiny flickering heart I saw this afternoon. This isn’t about me or him, and I probably need to start trying a little harder.

“Can we meet this weekend?” he asks. “I’ll come to you.”

If he’s willing to fly all the way to LA, he either wants something or plans to demand something, and I’m not interested. “That seems like a lot of trouble for what you could probably say right here in thirty seconds.”

He exhales. A heavy, weary exhale. If he’s tired of me now, just wait ’til he gets to know me.

“There’s a lot to discuss, Keeley, and nuance is lost when you’re discussing things by phone. We’ll go to dinner, and that’s it.”

A dinner he’ll spend badgering me, pushing and pushing for whatever it is he wants. For that little flickering heart, though, I guess I can agree.





The restaurant he’s chosen is not, to my vast surprise, the all-you-can-eat, buy one-get-one-free buffet I’d expected. And if Graham is shelling out for this place, he must be after something big. “I’ve bought you this nice steak dinner,” he’ll say, “and now I need you to sign a twenty-page contract agreeing to my demands.”

It’s another tactic I remember from my childhood. “Your father is cooperating,” my mom would say with a sigh. “He must want something.”