A Camden's Baby Secret. Victoria Pade

to go to the farmhouse.

       Chapter Four

      It was positive.

      Livi took the home pregnancy test first thing Tuesday morning and stared at the display on the stick until it showed the results.

      But a positive reading didn’t necessarily mean the test was right.

      There were false positives, weren’t there?

      Or she could have done it wrong.

      Dazed, feeling as if everything was spinning out of control, she reread the instructions.

      Then she stared at the display again, willing it to show her something different.

      And at the same time thinking that this would have been such happy news if Patrick was still alive.

      They’d wanted children, had tried for them. She’d even had a plan for how to tell him.

      But this?

      She just couldn’t face it happening like this.

      So she wasn’t going to, she decided.

      She wasn’t going to fully believe it until a doctor told her for sure.

      Especially when she was hardly sick at all this morning.

      She’d go to the doctor. The doctor would say this happened sometimes—an imbalance of hormones that was delaying her period and causing a false-positive test, but she wasn’t pregnant.

      She couldn’t be pregnant.

      The doctor would clear it all up.

      The sooner the better.

      So she called her gynecologist in Denver and made an appointment, trying desperately to stay in a state of denial.

      * * *

      Livi was surprised—and not particularly pleased—to find Callan at Greta’s school when she went for Greta’s going-away party that afternoon.

      Greta had invited her the day before, but hadn’t mentioned that Callan was coming, too. And Livi was in no shape to see him—the guy who wanted them both to just forget Hawaii and everything that had happened there.

      How would she ever tell him?

      But she couldn’t think about it. She couldn’t think about any of it. And she’d given herself permission not to until she saw her doctor, so she pushed any notion of pregnancy out of her mind.