stopped by your parents’ house first to see if I could find them for you but instead of them I found this stuck to the door,” Valerie said with a look that said she was sorry to be the messenger. “It’s a little worse for the wear, but the gist of it is they’ve gone off to some rock in Sedona to commune with like souls. Sorry, I tried.”
“I know, and thanks. I’m not surprised. It’s just—” Maya stopped, then made herself smile. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just really glad you came. You don’t know how wonderful it is to see you.” After three days without seeing a familiar face or being able to share her joys and fears about Joey with anyone she knew, Maya felt close to tears seeing Valerie. She brushed quickly at her eyes, pretending to rub the sleep out of them.
“It’s okay, babies do that to you,” Valerie said, taking her hand and squeezing. “It’s good to see you, too, honey. You look a little banged up, but from what I hear, you’re lucky to be alive. You and your little boy.”
“Have you seen him?”
Valerie nodded. “He’s tiny and precious. But I hear he’s doing just fine. He’ll just need a little extra TLC for a while.”
“So the doctor keeps telling me.” Maya turned to look out the window into the bright sunlight, tears welling in her eyes. “He—he just looks so little and helpless right now. And they’re not going to let me take him home with me when I leave here. They still won’t tell me how long he’s got to stay, and I’m just so worried about him.”
“I know. But Lia Kerrigan is a good doctor,” Valerie said, echoing what Sawyer had told her. “Before you know it, your baby will be a boisterous, rowdy little boy and you’ll wonder how he ever could have been so small and quiet. Believe me, I know, between the twins and now the baby.”
“You have a baby?” Maya remembered Valerie had married her high school boyfriend shortly after graduation. The marriage had gone wrong almost from the start, and less than two years later Valerie had taken her twin daughters and left. “New husband, new baby—wow, has it been that long?”
Valerie laughed. “It’s been a few years since we were sixteen, dreaming up ways to cut algebra. I think my favorite was the time we took your dad’s motorcycle and skipped school for two days so we could go to that music festival in Taos.”
A flash of memories made Maya smile. “We were trouble, weren’t we?”
“And proud of it,” Valerie said. “Now I’m working to keep my kids in line. And not succeeding most days. If it weren’t for Paul, I’d be a crazy person by now. This time I got it right.” She hesitated, looking uncertainly at Maya before asking, “What about you?”
It was the closest Valerie would come to outright asking her what had brought her back to Luna Hermosa, unmarried, with a baby. And what could she say? She’d left shortly after high school graduation to find something her parents had never been able to give her—stability, commitment, someone willing to share responsibility. She thought she’d found those things in Evan, but she couldn’t have been more wrong.
“I decided to come home to have my baby,” she said at last, not ready to rehash the last miserable year with her ex-fiancé. “Unfortunately that turned out to be a really bad idea.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. You’re here and you’re both okay. And I hear it was our finest resident knight in shining armor, Sawyer Morente, who came to your rescue. You remember Sawyer, don’t you?” Valerie prodded. “You know, Mr. Captain of Everything in high school, Air Force hero, the guy with the killer smile?”
“I remember him.” Maya suddenly felt warm and restless. The memories of the accident, of giving birth, of the moment she first held her son, were as clear as if they’d happened minutes, not days ago. And they evoked the same uncomfortable mix of emotions, somewhere between embarrassment at having to be rescued and to give birth in the back of an ambulance and an odd lingering sense of intimacy with the man who’d safely delivered Joey. Avoiding Valerie’s eyes, she fidgeted with the blanket, reached back to adjust her pillow. “I suppose everyone in town knows what happened by now.”
“Well, it hasn’t been in the newspaper yet,” Valerie said, then laughed when Maya shot her a wide-eyed look somewhere between horror and disbelief. “Paul is a firefighter. He and Sawyer work the same shift most of the time. So—”
“So everyone knows I’m not married and that Sawyer delivered my baby on the side of the road. And next week it probably will be in the paper,” Maya muttered.
“It’s not that bad. I’m sure there are at least a few people who don’t know what happened,” Valerie said with a wink. “Oh, I almost forgot. These are for you.” She reached over to the bedside table and tugged forward a plastic pitcher filled with an eclectic mix of brightly colored wildflowers. “I caught Sawyer bringing these to you when I was on my way up to see you. He didn’t want to wake you, so I offered to deliver them for him. Sorry about using your water pitcher but it was all I could find.”
“Sawyer? Brought these?” Maya almost couldn’t believe her ears. Sawyer Morente had brought her flowers? The most drop-dead gorgeous guy in town, every girl’s idea of the perfect romance hero, had picked wildflowers for the hippie girl no one ever wanted to be seen with? Don’t make more of it than it is. “I suppose it isn’t every day he delivers a baby by himself in a thunderstorm,” she murmured as much to herself as Val.
“No, but it figures it was Sawyer. Paul calls him Zorro because he always seems to be the one riding to the rescue whenever someone’s in trouble around here. Although…” Val turned thoughtful. “Paul said delivering Joey seemed to really affect Sawyer. Maybe it’s because he understands what it’s like.”
“You lost me,” Maya said.
Shrugging, Val didn’t quite meet Maya’s eyes. “I guess you don’t remember hearing the gossip, but Sawyer’s father abandoned him and his brother when Sawyer was about seven. He completely cut those two boys out of his life. He never acknowledged they existed ever again, even though he still lives less than fifteen miles from them.”
An odd ache touched Maya, hurting her heart and burning her eyes with unshed tears. Whether for Sawyer’s loss or her and Joey’s, she didn’t know, but she felt like crying, giving in to the sadness that had shadowed her since Joey’s birth.
To distract herself Maya brushed a finger over a daisy, breathed in the fresh scents of lavender and sage. “I guess he thought wildflowers would suit me better than roses,” she mused, still wondering at his gesture. “They do remind me of home.”
“You are home now,” Valerie said firmly. “And you’re not alone, no matter how much it might feel that way sometimes.”
Tears rushed to Maya’s eyes. “Thanks Val,” she said, reaching for her friend’s hand. “I know we’re going to be fine. I just need to get out of here and get settled at Mom and Dad’s for a while.”
“If you can call staying at your parents’ place ‘settled.’ They haven’t changed much.”
“Changed from tie-dye to spandex and back again, but finding the next Grateful Dead concert is still their top priority.” Maya sighed. “Maybe it’s better they’ve taken off again. If they were here, I’d have three kids to keep up with.”
“Well, don’t you worry, Paul and I are here to help. And then there’s Sawyer…”
“Oh, no—” Maya held up her hands “—don’t even go there. He was only concerned about Joey. Like you said, he can sympathize. End of story.”
“Oh, right, that’s why he brought Joey flowers. I’m sure at three days old he’ll really appreciate them. Yikes, look at the time. I hate to run mi amiga, but Paul’s shift starts soon and I need to get home to the kids before he goes.”
“Thanks so much for coming,” Maya said, returning Valerie’s quick hug. “I can’t