He Left Me at a Rest Stop on Halloween, So He Came Home to No Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Rest Stop
After pie at his parents' house, Travis leaves Cassidy at a highway rest stop to take his first love's daughter trick-or-treating, and she hears him say she would never leave. The paramedic asks for her next of kin and she has none.
At nine o'clock on Halloween night, my husband drove out of a highway rest stop and left me standing in the lot.
I was thirty-four weeks pregnant, and my coat didn't close over my stomach anymore.
Two hours earlier, I had thought it was a good night.
I had baked a pumpkin pie for his parents, and Gail had called it the best one she'd ever had.
I had set a tiny orange pumpkin in the middle of her table, and she had kept it there through the whole dinner.
"You sit, dear," Gail said when I stood to clear. "The doctor said no overdoing it, and I'm taking that seriously."
She wrapped the leftovers in foil and filled a thermos with ginger tea for the drive.
She even pressed a hand to my belly at the door and said, "Next year, we'll have a little one in a costume."
I believed her.
Ron met us on the porch with a shopping bag.
Inside was a pair of pink snow boots with a tag still on them.
"Size one and a half," he said. "Kendra's girl outgrew her last pair already."
"Dad, you spoil that kid," Travis said.
"Somebody should," Ron said.
I thought it was sweet. Kendra was Travis's high school girlfriend, and her daughter was six.
Travis drove. I sat with the pie dish on my lap and my phone in my coat pocket.
An hour north on the interstate, his dashboard lit up.
The screen said Kendra.
He answered before the second ring.
"Travis, I'm so sorry," she said. She was crying. "The car won't start, and she's been in her costume since four. She keeps asking when we're going."
"Where are you?" Travis said.
"The church parking lot. I don't know who else to call."
I looked at him.
He didn't look at me.
"I'm coming," he said. "Don't move."
"Travis, we're an hour from there," I said. "Can't someone from the church help her?"
"There's an exit coming up. I'll drop you at the plaza, get her, and be back in forty minutes."
"My doctor said not to be alone. Not this far along."
"It's forty minutes, Cass."
He pulled into the service plaza and stopped at the curb outside the building.
"Get a hot chocolate," he said. "You'll be fine. You always are."
My purse was on the floor of the car.
I didn't think of it until I was out in the cold with the door shut and his taillights already turning toward the ramp.
I had my phone, my coat, and one dollar bill in my pocket.
I went inside and sat on a bench by the vending machines.
At nine-thirty, I called him.
He didn't pick up.
At ten, I called again, and the first low cramp pulled across my back.
I told myself it was the bench.
By ten-thirty, I had called ten times, and the cramps were coming in a pattern I had read about in every book on my nightstand.
I called an eleventh time.
Voicemail.
I stood up to walk it off, and I had to hold the wall.
I called a twelfth time, and this time it connected.
There was no hello.
There was road noise, and a child's voice in the back singing something about candy.
Then Kendra said, close to the microphone, "Is she going to be mad?"
"Cassidy?" Travis said.
His voice was easy and tired, the one he used on his mother.
"Cassidy has loved me for ten years. She would never leave me."
Kendra laughed a little.
Nobody asked where I was.
Nobody said my name again.
The call stayed open for another minute, and I stood in the vestibule of a rest stop and listened to my husband sing along to the radio.
Then I pressed the red button.
I didn't call him a thirteenth time.
I dialed 911 and told the woman who answered that I was pregnant, alone, and having contractions every four minutes.
She told me to sit down and unlock the door for the crew.
The ambulance pulled up to the glass doors soon after.
A man in a navy jacket came through the glass doors with a bag on his shoulder and knelt in front of me without making me stand up.
"Ma'am, I'm Eli. How far along are you?"
"Thirty-four weeks."
He put two fingers on my wrist and looked at the clock on the wall.
"Okay. We're going to take you to the hospital now. Who can we call for you? Husband, family?"
My phone was still in my hand.
It was lighting up with a name I knew.
I turned it over on my knee.
"I don't have anyone," I said.
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