The next day was not a good day.
It was an awful, wibbly-wobbly day that felt like a week, and a terrible week at that, because Chloe woke up to morning sickness that put all her previous queasiness to shame.
“Do you want crackers?” Tom asked, clearly trying to be helpful. Chloe shoved him out of the way and threw up all over his bathroom.
No, she didn’t want crackers.
What was happening inside her body? This was not okay. In a panic, she called Jenna. “What can I do?”
“Lots of little meals,” Jenna said. “And rest.”
If she couldn’t handle the thought of crackers, how was anything more substantial going to happen? “Food terrifies me right now.”
“Tea, then. Water. Small sips, take it slow. If it gets really difficult to keep liquid down, go to the hospital and we can get you hooked up on an IV.”
“An IV?” Panic heaved hard inside of her, joining everything else.
“Worst case scenario only,” Jenna added quickly. “I can bring vitamins around right now, and some ginger tea that might settle your stomach.”
As soon as she hung up the phone, Chloe turned to Tom. “I want Jenna to be our midwife.”
But it turned out it wasn’t that easy. Jenna was going to be on holidays around their due date, so while she could do their first few appointments, it would be another midwife who would follow them closely and attend Chloe’s delivery—Kerry. The apartment thief.
“She’s great,” Jenna said as she nudged the cup of ginger tea across the table. “Come in to the Walkerton office on Monday and meet her. We won’t have our Pine Harbour offices open for a couple of months, unfortunately.”
Monday was New Year’s Eve, but instead of celebrating with a party, Chloe would be meeting a midwife, and urgently, because of her brutal morning sickness. Well, didn’t that just make the whole thing even more real.
Tom drove her the hour south to Walkerton, where the midwives had their offices. That was life on the peninsula. Everything except the local grocery store was an hour away, a long drive down the single highway connecting them to the rest of the province.
Chloe wasn’t sure if it was nerves or morning sickness that was twisting up her insides as they got closer. Both, perhaps.
But when they arrived and checked in at the front desk in the cozy office suite, decorated in shades of plum and soft, touchable fabrics, a new feeling took hold. Quivering of another sort—excitement.
She didn’t know what to expect, but she suddenly felt like she was in the right place. There was an overflowing bookshelf of pregnancy resource materials at one end of the couch, and if there was anything that could make Chloe feel at home, it was a lending library.
While they waited, she filled out the intake forms. Jenna popped out to say hi in between appointments, and then a new face was standing in front of them. A woman about the same age as Chloe, with dark curls that bounced around her face, and an easy warm smile.
“I’m Kerry. And you must be Chloe.”
She stood. “Hi. This is Tom. The dad.”
“Hi Tom. Come on back, both of you.” Kerry led them to an examination room and gestured for them to sit.
Chloe decided in that moment not to mention that Kerry had stolen her apartment. That didn’t matter anymore. She’d spent a couple of days curled up in Tom’s bed, and frankly didn’t have the energy to think about moving anywhere ever again.
Kerry gave them a brief overview of the midwifery model of care, then they figured out a rough due date based on Chloe’s last period. Mid August. Chloe had already figured it out from the times her and Tom had had sex, and the date was pretty close.
“That makes you seven weeks pregnant now. A little early for such intense morning sickness, so let’s keep an eye on that.” Kerry rifled through a folder on her desk, then handed over an information sheet with Hyperemesis Gravidarum spelled out ominously at the top. “This is the worst case scenario, mind you. I’ll give you a call at the end of the week and see how you’re doing. Or you can call me at any time if something changes.” She explained the procedure for paging her, day or night, and how a back-up midwife might respond if Kerry was sleeping before or after a delivery. “If all goes well, our next appointment will be in four weeks. Until then, just follow your body’s cues for eating and drinking and sleeping.”
Even though it was New Year’s Eve, and Tom had the day off work from his day job at the provincial park, the Search and Rescue team was doing a practice that night. It was an annual tradition that they joked helped ward off a real rescue call on one of the longest nights of the year.
“I need to go to the training centre for a few hours,” he said to Chloe on the drive home.
“Okay,” she said brightly.
“Do you want me to make some dinner before I leave?” He felt weird about abandoning her, but tomorrow he’d be at work all day. On Wednesday, he worked during the day and had his weekly army reserve parade at night.
This wasn’t new. They’d been hanging out for a year. She knew he had a lot on the go.
But that was before she was pregnant, and sick, and living in his house where he could see how sweetly vulnerable she was.
He wanted to stay home and take care of her forever, but that wasn’t practical or realistic. Also, it probably wouldn’t go over well with Ms. Independent, who was making a face at the thought of food.
She shook her head. “I’m kind of scared to eat anything substantial. I think I’ll have crackers in bed and watch a feel-good movie.”
He grinned. “That sounds amazing.”
“I know, right?” She laughed, a long, trailing lilt of lovely noise that stirred the sweetest of feelings inside him.
Hours later, he was still grinning as he walked into the search and rescue team meeting.
“Someone’s happy,” Sean commented dryly.
He really was. He finally had the girl and they were going to have a baby. Speaking of which—the two of them were relatively alone, with the few other team members already there in the kitchenette noisily making coffee. Tom dropped his voice nonetheless. “Hey, did Jenna tell you…?”
Sean raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “I know nothing, if I’m supposed to know nothing, but if there were something know, I may have guessed. Secrets are safe with me, though.”
Tom didn’t think it was possible for his grin to get any bigger. “We went to the first midwife appointment today.”
Sean held out his hand. “Congrats, man. That’s awesome.”
They shook on it, then Tom raked his hand through his hair. “It is. Chloe’s been sick for a couple of days, and I wish I could make it better for her, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Did Jenna get sick?”
“A bit. She had this tea that helped.”
“She brought that over the other day.”
Sean laughed. “Right. She said Chloe had the flu. Which isn’t funny,” he hastened to add.
Tom waved it off. “No, I get it. I don’t know how long we’re going to keep it quiet, but for a bit, you know?”
“Mum’s the word. Listen, can I give you a word of unsolicited partner advice?”
Tom thought about all the times he’d offered his own thoughts on his friends’ love lives. Chickens coming home to roost, but he didn’t mind. “Consider it solicited. What do you got?”
“Follow her lead. Don’t try to baby her too much, but be ready when she needs it. We’ve only done it once so far, and Jenna was a rockstar, but the whole transition to motherhood thing is a rollercoaster. No, more of a… Honestly, it’s like they’re in training for a marathon. And you’re the support team, not the coach. Got it?”
Tom took a deep breath. “Yeah. I can do that. Thanks.”
“Once everyone knows, you’ll be bombarded by advice from the others.”
“Ha.” Tom shrugged. “Fair turnabout. I’ve had a lot of thoughts on how you guys should fix things with your women for years.”
Sean chuckled, then pointed his cane at the kitchen. “You can buy me a coffee to make up for that, now that you know how damn hard it is to negotiate the minefields.”
It was the least he could do. He went and poured them both mugs, tossing a toonie into the tin.
Sean took his mug and lifted it in a cheers. “Happy new year, man.”
It was going to be, that was for damn sure. Everything was slotting exactly into place. Maybe not in the order he’d imagined, but that didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that in the end, they were together and happy.
When he got home, well before midnight, Chloe was asleep in his bed, the end of a movie quietly playing on his TV. No crackers in sight.
He refilled her water glass, then washed up and joined her in bed.
No champagne for them this year. Hopefully next year they’d have a glass while a baby slept peacefully on his chest.
He fell asleep with that thought in his mind—and woke up to the sound of heaving.
A quick glance at the clock told him it was early, but time to get up. He put on a pot of coffee, and set a new box of crackers on the counter.
“This is bullshit,” Chloe said weakly as she joined him in the kitchen.
“I’m sorry.” He held his arms out wide and she came in for a hug. “Dare I ask if you want something for breakfast?”
She shook her head.
They spent New Year’s Day lounging around and reading together.
The next morning—the first day back at work after the holidays—was a repeat of the same scene.
“Bullshit,” Tom said when Chloe shuffled into his arms.
“Right?”
He smiled against her hair. “Are you calling in sick?” The winter was light at the parks. He was already rearranging his own day in his head. Maybe he could come home and make her a light lunch…
But she was shaking her head. “Nope. This is my new normal. I’ll soldier through. Besides, there’s a meeting about the library closure today. I don’t want to miss that.”
He set his hands on her shoulders. “One thing at a time. How about we get dressed for work?”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s another thing. My body has decided it hates waistbands already. I may need to do some shopping.”
“Do you have anything in storage that would work? We could dash down the peninsula at the end of the day.”
“The thought of driving an hour to paw through boxes in the dark does not appeal.” She shook her head. “I’ll just order a few comfy things online.”
“What if the boxes were here instead?”
She frowned and cocked her head to the side.
He waited.
Then she laughed. “Okay, one thing at a time. Let’s get dressed for work.”
Chloe took a deep breath as she followed her coworkers into the small conference room at the back of the Pine Harbour library. She couldn’t remember them ever using this room themselves. It was booked regularly by community groups, and used occasionally by some local high school students taking classes remotely. It was rarely empty, but today it had been signed out by the director of their regional library service.
This was a meeting she would have missed if she’d continued on her ridiculous plan to flee the peninsula. A niggle of guilt spiked inside her, mixed with relief that Tom had found her and stayed with her while she worked through her fears—or at least the top layer of them. There was more to unpack there, she knew that. For example: how much anxiety she had around this library being closed unfairly.
“Thank you all for coming in today.” The director smiled at their small group. Two full-time librarians, two assistants, and a deputy director who worked part-time hours in three libraries up and down the peninsula. “We know the news right before Christmas was not what you wanted to hear. It wasn’t what we wanted to communicate, either. The funding cuts have hit us hard, and we’re scrambling to adjust while still meeting community needs across the county.”
What about Pine Harbour’s community needs, Chloe wanted to protest. But she knew there would be a time for questions, for their voices to be heard, and this wasn’t it. Not yet.
“Blunt talk time: we don’t have enough money to operate all the branches we have across the county. Before the start of the next fiscal year, some will need to be permanently closed. Others will be able to continue operate at reduced hours.”
Screw not asking questions yet. Chloe shoved her hand in the air. The director paused and nodded at her. “Yes?”
“What is the difference between those two groups of libraries? Why aren’t we on the slate that is simply having hours reduced?”
“Age of the building, village population, proximity to schools, and utility costs were our primary factors. We haven’t fully finished our analysis—the leaked documents before Christmas didn’t reflect that preliminary stage—but…”
Chloe’s head started buzzing. Preliminary stage. Incomplete analysis.
All she heard was that there was a chance to save her library. She flipped to a new page in her notebook and wrote down the factors the director outlined.
Utility costs
Age of building
Proximity to schools
Village population
She couldn’t do anything about the village population—Pine Harbour was small, no denying that—but what if the library could move to another building? Moving came with its own set of costs, of course, but maybe they could crowdsource those funds. She also wondered—and maybe hoped—the school proximity data didn’t take into consideration the distance ed high schoolers, or the home schooling population.
It was time to gather some numbers of her own. She wasn’t going to challenge the director in this meeting. She would follow up with a polite email tomorrow. Get it in writing, and reply in kind.
For once in her life, she was going to buckle down and have some serious impulse control.
“Chloe, do you have something to say?”
She looked up to find the deputy director giving her A Look. Like, fix your face kind of look. Apparently her impulse control didn’t extend to her expression as she processed what she was hearing.
“I have questions,” she said carefully. “But I’m not sure if this is the time for them.”
The director gave a slight nod of her head. “Consider this an open forum.”
Chloe felt like she was tiptoeing onto a tightrope strung between two skyscrapers as she glanced around the room. Other than Jenna and Olivia, she hadn’t found a lot of support in Pine Harbour for being brash and loud. But none of her co-workers wanted the branch to close, right?
“Is there anything we can do—or rather, is there anything that can be done, by anyone—to change the status of this branch on that preliminary list? Anything that could move it to the reduced hours list? Is it the building that’s the problem, or are we not properly capturing library usage?”
When she stopped, silence reverberated off the walls.
Had she fallen into a trap?
“Our goal is avoid job loss as much as possible,” the director said slowly. “If that’s your concern.”
The other full-time librarian shook her head. “That’s not my concern. I’m close to retirement, and would be happy to move to a larger town for the next few years. But this town uses this library. I agree with Chloe. What can we do to protect it for them?”
This time, the silence wasn’t as scary. It was thinking space, full of deep breaths and flipping through pages. Finally, the director leaned back in her chair. “I’m not making any promises.”
“But?” Chloe leaned in. So much for playing it cool. She was eager, more eager than she’d ever have guessed, and she wanted to grab something concrete right now.
“We need to reduce operating costs by forty percent. That’s not possible in standalone libraries like this one. And by the summer, the budget just will not exist for this branch to remain open.”
It sounded ominous. It was ominous. But what Chloe heard was that the library would need to move to a shared space.
She knew who she had to talk to next.
On her lunch break, she grabbed her bag with her hidden box of crackers, tugged on her parka, hat, and mittens, and told the others she was going for a walk. It was a brisk five minute stroll to Olivia’s house.
“I need to talk to you about a hypothetical situation,” she said when her friend opened the door. “And you can’t ask any questions because I’m not supposed to tell anyone just yet.”
Liv held the door wide open. “Come in to my office.”
Before she had Sophia, Olivia had worked as a waitress at Mac’s, and then did location scouting for a movie company. That led to her current job as the local assistant to movie star Hope Creswell, who had come to Pine Harbour to film that movie and fell in love with a local man, Ryan Howard, and his three children. And the biggest thing that Olivia did for Hope was leverage her star power into helping local charities and businesses—which meant Liv had all the connections. At some point in the near future, Chloe would need the right connection to organically present an opportunity to the library. Olivia was the person who could make that happen.
Her office was a desk in her living room. Toys scattered the floor around it, but there was no toddler in sight.
“Soph’s having a nap,” Olivia said. “Do you want tea?”
Chloe consulted her stomach, which tentatively thought tea sounded fine. “Yes, please.”
“I’ll put the kettle on. What’s this mysterious, hypothetical situation?”
“The library might need a new home.”
Olivia looked surprised. Chloe knew the feeling. “I’m guessing I can’t ask why?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. I shouldn’t even be here, but I don’t know enough about the political dynamics to know where to start looking for alternative locations, and I don’t trust the higher ups to get it right.”
“What’s the timeline?”
Chloe hesitated. “Hard to say. Soon, though.” She took a deep breath. “It’s a budget issue, I can say that much. Confidentially. Our current location is too expensive. Overhead costs, infrastructure repair…a lot of language I barely understand, to be honest. But the bottom line is that libraries in shared spaces are less expensive than ones in dedicated locations.”
Olivia nodded slowly. “When does the budget year end?”
Chloe felt the blood drain from her face. She was not good at keeping secrets, or being subtle.
“Oh.” Olivia sighed. The kettle on the stove started to whistle, and she turned it off, then added tea bags to a pot and poured the water over them. Chloe could see the wheels churning in her brain. “So what you need is a space to become available, one that might not cost anything. And soon.”
“Yes,” Chloe said quietly. “It might buy us some time.”
“I’m on it.” She poured the tea into two cups and passed one over. “Does Tom know?”
“I’ll tell him tonight.”
Olivia smiled.
“What?”
“I like that you’re together now. Have you officially moved in to his place?”
Chloe made a scrunchy face to cover a smile she couldn’t stop from spreading across her face. “Well, I’m staying there.”
Olivia laughed. “Like a couch surfer?”
“Like a commitment-phobic woman with trust issues.”
“It’s obvious he wants you to move in with him.”
“I know. But I’m not sure we know each other as well as he thinks we do.” They were getting there, though. “So we need to get to know each other better. As partners, in life and parenting. One thing at a time, and, uh, maybe we don’t need to worry about what’s official or not.”
“I hear a lot of words that sound like you’re hedging your bets.”
“I do that like a pro, yep.”
“But you’re racing into the fight to save your library.” Olivia’s eyes went wide. “Is this why you were crying before Christmas? Have you known about this for a while?”
Chloe made another face. “Stop being freaking psychic.”
“That’s shitty news to break before the holidays.”
“It wasn’t great, no. I really thought…” She trailed off, then shook her head. “Anyway, I’m glad Tom found me and convinced me there’s good reasons for me to stick around.”
Olivia chewed her bottom lip. “Hmm.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just that…I’m surprised you care.” She held up her hand. “I know that sounds harsh. But you’ve always been a little bit…take it or leave it about this town. Which I get! I really do. The old guard can be a bit much, and you love to beat to your own drum. But if, hypothetically, the library were closing, wouldn’t that be a good excuse to get out of Dodge?”
That was harsh.
It was also true. If she didn’t have a job here, she wouldn’t have to live here.
Chloe frowned. “Even if I was—am—on the fence about this town, that doesn’t mean that the people here don’t need a library. I can fight for them and think about leaving at the same time.” She took a long sip of her tea. “Hypothetically.”
From the bedroom, a little voice called out.
Naptime was over, and not a moment too soon.
“I have to get back to work. Don’t tell anyone about this conversation, okay?”
Olivia gave her a concerned look. “I’ll get you a list of places that could maybe accommodate a new service space. On the down low.”
“You’re the best.”
“So are you,” her friend said. “I hope you realize that.”