The next leg of Delia’s journey took her into San Antonio where she had several inspections to do, including two hotels. She spent two days there, and took a couple of hours off to visit the Alamo. The next stop was Houston, which again took two days to cover all of the properties there. It wasn’t that she was less hurt about Ivan’s attitude and refusal to acknowledge that his body may have healed itself, but her travels were helping to lighten her mood somewhat. The only times that she had to dwell on her situation were the stretches of interstate between cities.
She was on the lookout for a place where she thought she might like to live when she had to leave Shadow Mountain Ranch. So far, the parts of Texas she’d driven through hadn’t appealed to her all that much, but then there was a lot of the state she hadn’t seen. That seemed impossible, given the number of hours that she had spent driving across the state, but she knew from looking at a map of Texas that there was a lot more to it than what she had seen.
She still had several states to go, so she would reserve judgment until the end of her trip. Who knows? Maybe by the time she got back home, Ivan would have come to his senses about the whole thing. She had planned to be looking for a new job along the way, too, but she decided she couldn’t look for a job until she found a place where she would want to live.
Her nightly emails from and to Ivan hadn’t improved any. They were still business-like and impersonal. It was hard to keep from pouring out her heart into an email and telling Ivan how much she loved him and how devastated she was at his rejection of her. But she had said all of that at home and it hadn’t fazed him then, so why should it now?
Ivan, too, was trying his best to throw himself into his work. After a week of avoiding his staff and going stir crazy around the ranch, he decided to take off and go over to California and check on a couple of office buildings that he owned in San Diego. Maybe a few days away would get him back on a more even keel.
He threw a small suitcase with a couple of changes of clothes and his toiletries in it into the Roadmaster and took off early one morning. He merely left a note for the staff telling them he’d be gone a few days and to just carry on as usual. They were all mystified by his behavior. They knew it had something to do with Delia, but none of them had any idea what the problem was. They all speculated a lot, but in the end, no one really knew anything concrete.
Ivan dropped down through the desert to I-8 which he took all the way in to San Diego. He stopped when he wanted to and drove when he wanted to, taking two days to make the journey. Once in San Diego, he checked into his hotel that sat right down near the beach. It was a lovely place, but all he could think of was Delia and how she had never seen the ocean.
After he’d done the inspections in San Diego, he drove up the coastline as far as Morro Bay, where he just lollygagged on the beach for half a day. He had no properties in that immediate area, so he was there only to try and shake the mood that Delia had put him in. The thought of that sperm test kit sitting in his bathroom cupboard kept creeping to the forefront of his mind until he could stand it no longer.
In the anonymity of a strange town, he went to the drug store and bought another kit, and used it in the privacy of his hotel room. It took ten of the longest minutes of his entire life to develop the results. What he saw blew him away. According to this drug store test kit, he was not merely fertile, but very fertile. When … how …? How in the world could this possibly be true? It was probably a dud kit. What could he expect for forty bucks?
He threw the whole thing in the trash and went to bed. After tossing and turning for an hour, he turned on the TV hoping that something would lull him to sleep. Eventually it did. He awakened the next morning eager to get home again. He would use the test kit that was waiting for him at home. If it gave the same results, he would go see a doctor and let him tell him how unreliable home test kits are.
Once he got back on the road, he spent a day and a half getting back home. Part of him wanted to hurry up and verify the results of the test he’d taken in Morro Bay, and part of him didn’t know if he could take being told the home kit was bogus and he was still sterile. If he truly wasn’t sterile, that meant that Delia’s baby was most likely his. Which meant that he had been a total jerk to her. His thoughts swung back and forth between what if he was and what if he still wasn’t. It was enough to drive a guy crazy.
Meanwhile, Delia was having issues of her own. Roughly halfway between Houston and Baton Rouge, she had a blowout on the freeway and nearly wrecked the car. It was just very fortunate that she happened to be on an empty stretch when the tire blew, because she swerved all over both lanes for a bit until she got the car under control again and pulled it off onto the shoulder.
After she had stopped shaking somewhat, she reached for her cell phone and called Triple A. Then she sat there and waited for forty minutes for someone to arrive to change her tire. Fortunately, she had stuck a small Sudoku book into her purse, so she pulled it out and was trying to pass the time by doing the number puzzles while she waited.
Finally, a man driving a truck from a tire shop in the next town over showed up and got her tire changed in record time. She gave him her Triple A number, took the receipt that he offered her, thanked him and they both went on their way. That night in a Tranquility Inn in Baton Rouge, she emailed Ivan and told him about her misadventure that day. He showed proper concern for her safety and hoped she would have no more trouble along the way.
Louisiana was interesting, but didn’t appeal to her as a place to live, so after completing inspections in both Baton Rouge and New Orleans, she made her way on through the southern tip of Mississippi and into Alabama and Mobile, which was her next stop. The one office building in Mobile didn’t take but an hour or so, and then she was on her way to Pensacola, Florida, where she checked into Tranquility Inn Pensacola for the night.
After she had entered her daily report into the company system, she sent Ivan an email letting him know that her travels had been uneventful that day. She wanted to pretend that he actually cared that she was safe on the road, and not just as a business asset, but because he loved her. She wanted to believe it, but she was having a difficult time. His return emails were so impersonal that they almost hurt worse than not hearing from him at all would. But she knew that impersonal or not, they were from him, and she looked forward to just simply hearing from him at all.
As soon as Ivan got back home from California, he went straight to his room on the pretext of unpacking his suitcase. But what he really was anxious to do was to take that other fertility test that he had bought and then hidden in the cupboard. After ten very long minutes, it, too, confirmed that he was indeed capable of making babies. That did it. He grabbed the phone book he kept in his bedroom, looked up a men’s clinic in Scottsdale, and made an appointment.
It would be a week before he could get in, but that was the first opening they had, so he had to settle for it. It would be a very long week, he was certain. Now he tried to get back into the swing of things around the ranch and actually interact some with his employees. They still cast questioning looks at him, but collectively decided to take his mood change at face value and not say anything until he chose to say something to them.
He also went to his grandparents’ place for a visit, as he hadn’t been there since this whole episode happened. They were of course delighted to see him and wouldn’t let him leave until he’d eaten lunch with them. If they noticed any change in his demeanor, they said nothing. When they asked him about Delia, he merely said that he had sent her out on an inspection tour by herself because he wanted to see how she handled it. It was a test of sorts for her, and so far, she was doing very well.
They reiterated their usual cautions to him regarding her, reminding him that she was not of their league and that he shouldn’t get too involved personally with her. He argued, politely of course, that she was a very smart, capable, beautiful woman, and that social status and breeding weren’t as important to his generation as they had been to theirs.
The more he talked her up, the more he missed her and realized that she was indeed all of those things, and more. He was beginning to get his hopes up that his body had indeed healed itself and that the baby that Delia was carrying was his, too. How wonderful it would be to have a son. Or a daughter. Just to father a child of either sex had been beyond his wildest dreams until just a day or two ago.
The day of his doctor’s appointment finally came. Even though he was a bit embarrassed about discussing his problem with anyone, much less a complete stranger, the doctor soon put him at ease. Ivan told him about the car accident and what his diagnosis had been at that time. Then he also told him the whole story about his girlfriend coming up pregnant and how he couldn’t believe that the baby was his. But he’d finally gone out and gotten a home fertility test kit—two of them, in fact—and they both showed that he was no longer sterile.
The doctor said that it was not unheard of for the body to heal itself like that, and that those home test kits were pretty reliable. But he went ahead and checked Ivan out, took the sample that he needed, and sent it to the in-house lab.
It took an hour for the results to come back, but when they did, the doctor called him back into the exam room and said, “Congratulations! You’re going to be a father!”
The announcement nearly took his breath away, but when he had somewhat recovered from the shock, he grinned, thanked the doctor and nearly sprinted out of the office.
In the privacy of his car, Ivan just sat there for a few moments going over in his mind the full implications of this whole situation. It sunk in even more than when he’d first considered the possibility that he had really been a jerk and had treated Delia shamefully. He had known how hurt she was right from the beginning, and he hadn’t done anything to try to ease her pain. He had only thought of himself and how she had allegedly wronged him. He knew that she had no time to carry on an affair with someone else. But he just couldn’t believe that he could be responsible for her pregnancy.
He had to tell her just as soon as possible, but it seemed inappropriate to do it over the phone. No, he’d find out where she would be tomorrow and would fly in to meet her. He’d think of some clever, sweet way to break the news to her, and then he would promise to make up for his callous treatment of her every day for the rest of his life.
Delia had spent this week in Florida, visiting and inspecting the many properties there owned by Peters Properties, Inc. There were hotels in Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, Orlando, West Palm Beach, Miami, Marathon, St. Petersburg, and Tampa. They were in addition to several office and apartment buildings, three shopping malls, and an exclusive golf course.
At the rate she was going, it would take Delia another week to complete the inspections in the state. But she had to admit that, above the pain that was with her constantly, she was really enjoying driving through Florida. She had now not only seen the Gulf of Mexico, but also the Atlantic Ocean.
She was totally blown away by the ocean. It was so much more than she had ever imagined. Sure, she had seen pictures of it, and had seen it on TV and in movies, but to see it in real life was just incredible. The wonder of the vastness of the ocean, and the amazing way that the waves rolled in, receded, and then rolled in again time after time after time, just astonished her.
She took off her shoes and went barefoot in the sand, loving the way it felt, and noting the difference in the way dry sand felt as compared to wet sand. She let the wavelets wash over her bare feet and marveled at the pull she felt when the water receded. She found a few shells, but only when she stopped at a more deserted stretch of beach. She ached with the wishing that Ivan was there to share her journey.
When she sent her nightly report from Miami, Ivan’s response seemed somehow different. He asked more pointed questions about where she was and where she planned to be the following day. She told him that she was scheduled to be at the Tranquility Inn Marathon on Boot Key the following evening, and that she had the mall and an office building in Miami to inspect during the day.
He also inquired as to how she was feeling, if she was still experiencing morning sickness. She answered yes, but it wasn’t so bad lately. She wondered if he were actually beginning to miss her. She certainly missed him. Oh, how she missed him! But she dismissed her hopes and chalked up his questions to a guilty conscience more than genuine caring. It almost left her feeling more sad than usual.
The next day, she left Miami mid-morning and drove down to the town of Marathon that sits strung out along one of the Florida Keys. Peters Properties, Inc. owned a small exclusive luxury hotel there on the beach. It was the only property she had to inspect in that area, so after checking in, she set out to do some sightseeing and have lunch. It was a gorgeous day, and Delia reveled in the beauty all around her. She just couldn’t get enough to watching the ocean.
About four o’clock, she went back to the hotel and did her walk-through, checking all the public areas of the building and grounds, as well as the employees-only areas. She went back to her room to do her report, and then planned to go get some supper. When she opened the door to her room, she gasped in shock.
Bouquets of flowers nearly filled the room, so that she could barely get inside. She stepped gingerly around the vases that sat on the floor, trying to get in far enough to shut the door. One bouquet on the small table about six feet from the door drew her attention. Amidst all of the profuse bouquets, this was a single red rose in a crystal vase. An envelope lay on the table in front of it.
She scanned the room for any evidence of human presence, but saw none. All she saw were flowers and more flowers. She picked up the envelope and saw her name written on the front in familiar handwriting. Her heart began to pound and her fingers shook as she broke the seal and pulled a card from the envelope. Printed on the front amidst a beautiful design were these words:
Sometimes we do things that hurt the one we love the most and don’t know how to go about asking for forgiveness. What I did was an awful thing. I said cruel words that I would take back in a heartbeat if it were possible. But if you can ever bring yourself to forgive me, I promise you that I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you. I will love you with the very essence of my being, and tell you every day how important you are to me and how completely and hopelessly I am in love with you.
She opened the card to the inside. The inside had been left blank by the card designer so that the giver would have a place to write.
Delia, my love, I am here to beg you to forgive me for not believing you and for not believing in you. If you still have any love in your heart for me, please say you’ll forgive me and accept me back into your heart and life. You were right. I was wrong. Will you allow me to be the best husband and father I can possibly be to you and to our baby? All my love, Ivan
By the time she finished reading, Delia was laughing and crying at the same time. Ivan loved her. Not only did he love her, he had finally come to admit that the child she carried beneath her heart was partly his, too. She read the card over again, tears flowing unchecked. But they were happy tears this time. Tears of relief, of joy, of unbounded love.
Then she looked around the room, looking for Ivan. He must be in here somewhere. Obviously, he had gotten into the room somehow. It appeared as if the local florist had delivered every single flower on the whole island. Propped up on the bed pillows was another note. It read:
If you can forgive me, please tape this red ribbon to the window. Then I will know that I can come to you.