A Winter Wedding(45)

“No. Her doctor told her that a planned pregnancy for someone in her situation was relatively common. There are added risks, of course, but she was willing to take those risks so she and Levi could start a family.” He found his coat.

She moved her guitar and sat down on the couch. She hadn’t played it since she’d come to his house, but he noticed that she always kept it close. “There’s always adoption.”

“He says he was open to that. She wanted at least one natural child.”

“So maybe he had to go along with it, to keep her happy. I could see a guy doing that for a woman who’s been through so much.”

The memory of when he’d been at the hospital, waiting to learn if Callie would survive the transplant, was indelibly etched on Kyle’s mind as one of the longest, most nerve-racking days of his life. “But he could lose her. We all could.”

She pulled her guitar into her lap and rested her arm over it. “I hope it doesn’t go that way.”

“So do I.” Kyle searched for his keys and discovered them on the counter. “I’ve got to go to the hospital. Will you be okay here alone?” She’d been planning to stay alone while she was in Whiskey Creek anyway, but it still felt odd to be rushing off and leaving her behind, in his house, when they’d been about to spend the evening together.

“Of course.”

He was already dialing Dylan and Cheyenne, to begin the process of alerting everyone else in their group, when she caught him at the door.

“Will you text me?” she asked. “Let me know how it’s going? That may seem like an odd request, since Callie’s a total stranger to me, but I can’t help being concerned.”

Dylan had answered Kyle’s call by then, so Kyle merely nodded and hurried out.

*

Hour after hour dragged by. The updates Lourdes received from Kyle were few and far between, since he had to step outside the hospital to get his message to go through. But he didn’t have much to report, anyway. Lourdes knew Callie wasn’t having a Cesarean. The doctors felt she’d have a better chance delivering naturally. But that was the extent of her information.

She tried to distract herself from the temptation to call Derrick by researching the complications Kyle’s friend might face. According to one site on the internet, 40 percent of infants born to women who’d had a liver or kidney transplant were premature, so it was probably fortunate that Callie’s pregnancy had lasted as long as it did. Four weeks wasn’t as early as it could’ve been.

Callie was still looking at a whole list of dangers, however—high blood pressure, kidney infection, preeclampsia and cholestasis, to name a few. The baby faced its fair share of peril, too—stunted growth, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, various infections and immune deficiencies, even birth defects. To make the situation even less certain, there hadn’t been sufficient testing to determine the effects that some of the newer antirejection drugs might have on an infant. Lourdes couldn’t even guess what Callie had been taking, of course. It could be corticosteroids, cyclosporine, azathioprine, tacrolimus or a whole host of others she saw listed on various websites. But Callie was likely on several. Everything Lourdes read suggested someone in Callie’s situation would have to be, and Kyle had said as much, too.

Lourdes could understand why he was worried. She was worried for Callie, too. But reading about childbirth was making her uncomfortable for other reasons. She was fairly certain she wanted to be a mother someday, but she couldn’t really see that happening if she stayed on her current course. Derrick didn’t seem particularly interested in raising kids. He never talked about it and put her off if she brought it up. She felt that at forty he should be more interested if he was ever going to be interested. They were both too involved in the constant challenges of the music business. Chasing success was like an all-consuming drug, so all-consuming that when she was in Nashville, it was easy to feel nothing else mattered.

Here in Whiskey Creek, however, she had to ask herself if chasing her dream meant she’d miss out on another important aspect of life.

Stop, she told herself. Even if she and Derrick could get past their current problems, she couldn’t have a child anytime soon. Her career would be completely dead if she had to pull away for even a few extra months—and trying to resuscitate it afterward would be almost as hard as starting over. How would she juggle those long days and late nights with a new baby?

She went to the couch and strummed her guitar, but she couldn’t shake the idea that she was standing on the verge of taking one of two very different paths. That reminded her of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” She could still recite some of it. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...”

Could the downturn in her career be a wake-up call? she wondered. A chance to stand back and reassess, to decide whether she really wanted to exchange fame and fortune for everything else?

Her phone rang. Once she reclaimed it from the dining table, she saw that it was Derrick—and silenced it. But when he called back again and again, she finally slid the answer button to the right.

“What do you want?” she snapped. Her uncertainty about him—about so many aspects of her life—left her unprepared to talk to him.

“Don’t be mad. Come on. I miss you, babe. You can’t be serious about Crystal. She has nothing on you.”