It Happened One Night by Lisa Dale Page A

is gonna work,” he said. “You’re gonna get in the car, say hello, and after that not a peep. We’ll drop you
     off somewhere you can stay, but then we don’t want to hear from you again. Have I made myself clear?”
    Calvert kicked his bag with the toe of his work boot. “Why’s she helping me?”
    “She always tries to do the right thing and be a good person. Even when she doesn’t want to. But just because
she’s
nice doesn’t mean
I
am. And I’m not gonna let you take advantage of her on my watch.”
    “I already done enough of that,” Calvert said.
    “We have an understanding?”
    “I won’t bother her.”
    Eli nodded. Then he headed back toward the car and left it up to Calvert to follow.
    Lana closed the door to her house, closed herself in. Through the translucent white curtain of the window beside the door,
     she watched Eli walking in long strides down the uneven concrete walkway toward his parked car. She wondered where he was
     going. Home? Or someplace else? Someplace with Kelly?
    He’d offered to stay with her. She wanted him to stay. But there was no sense in postponing the inevitable. At some point
     she would have to be alone with herself. With the truth. With the baby that had staked a claim on her body and now demanded
     a reckoning.
    She pushed the curtain aside, watching him hitch up his dark jeans and then bend his knees to look at something on the hubcap
     of his old green car.
    She’d always assumed that if she were to get pregnant she would know the moment it happened. There would be some spark, some
     quick shift in her sense of herself that would alert her that she was no longer alone in her own body. But the revelation
     hadn’t been a moment of mystical female intuition; it was just a dull and unfeeling fact.
    Of course it was only fitting that the day she’d realized she must be pregnant would be the day Calvert resurfaced. And yet
     for a moment when she was sitting on the closed toilet seat under the harsh bare bulb in the bathroom of the Wildflower Barn,
     Calvert’s appearance had felt no more significant than if she’d got the hiccups after having just learned she had nine months
     to live.
    The pregnancy was what mattered, the thing happening to her body that she could not stop. In a way it was lucky for Calvert
     that he’d called when he did: The fact that she was so consumed with her missed periods meant that coming face-to-face with
     him again seemed a bit removed and unreal. She wondered: If his call hadn’t come right at that second—right at the instant
     when she herself so desperately needed help—would she have gone to him? Probably not. She’d felt such an overwhelming sense
     of claustrophobia she would have taken any excuse to escape from the moment. The world had gone upside down, and she’d needed
     to do something—anything at all—to right it.
    Not even her memory of Calvert was safe from being distorted by the heaviness of realizing that she was pregnant. She’d remembered
     him as being larger-than-life, like some brooding tyrant who could order men dead with only the flash of his eyes. And yet
     at the police station today, his face was long and gaunt. His hair—once blonde like hers—was mostly gone on top, and his bald
     crown was pocked with liver spots. His shoulders were thin and bony, and the collar of his shirt had yellowed. She couldn’t
     find the connection between the shrunken, feeble Calvert who had shown up in Burlington and the terrible, mythic Calvert of
     her youth.
    Eli had been a godsend through the whole ordeal. He’d taken care of everything, and he did most of the talking. Except to
     say hello, Calvert hadn’t spoken directly to Lana at all, as if he was afraid to push his luck. She’d sat in the front seat
     of the car while Eli dropped her father on the doorstep of a run-down former hotel. He hadn’t asked her any questions or tried
     to make small talk—and she loved that about him, that he knew her so