Chapter 24: The Heartbeat

Geneva's POV

In March I booked my own appointment.

I did it from the shop counter on a Tuesday, with the phone held to my ear and a roll of ribbon in my other hand.

"Name?" the receptionist said.

"Geneva Garrard."

"Date of birth?"

I told her.

"And who is your emergency contact?"

I looked across the shop, where Carl was on a stepladder hanging a new sign over the cooler.

"Carl Creedon," I said. "And my sister, Darby."

I had not made my own doctor's appointment in two years.

The sign over the cooler said, in my mother's old lettering that a painter had copied from a photograph, The Garrard Fund.

Under it was a small desk with a lamp and two chairs.

On Wednesdays and Saturdays a lawyer sat there, and so did a woman from the county who knew which forms to bring.

Their first client had come in a week after the settlement.

She was twenty-four, with a baby on her hip and a husband's signature on a paper she hadn't read.

She had cried when she saw the sign, and then she had asked if she could buy flowers.

"For my sister," she said. "She's the one who told me to come."

I wrapped them myself, white ranunculus, and I didn't charge her.

Now, in March, there were eleven names on the list for the spring.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Traded Our Baby to Save His First Love from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.