Meant For Her by Joy Avery Melville

Author:Joy Avery Melville [Melville, Joy Avery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Sunday ~ January 5, 2014

“I’m glad you came this afternoon. I’ve got something I need talk to you about,” Candi said as she carried the teapot to the table and poured a cup of hot water for Debbie before pouring her own.

“Oh?” Debbie’s hand stilled, holding the teabag over the cup after dunking it once or twice. It dripped into the liquid beneath.

Candi sat in the chair closest to Debbie’s. Taking a packet from the basket in front of the two of them, she worked to get the bag from its foil and into her cup, dismayed to find her hand shaking. The water darkened after immersing the bag several times. She plopped a sugar cube into the tea then looked up to see Debbie watching her, her hand still holding her teabag above her cup.

“I’m sorry. Were you going to say something?”

“No, sugar. You said you needed to tell me something, and I’m sitting here in a dither, trying to figure out what that might be.” She put her bag back in her cup and picked up a spoon.

Rather than have Debbie see how nervous she’d become, Candi unobtrusively rubbed perspiring palms back and forth on her thighs and took a deep breath. “Since there’s no doubt I’m pregnant, and since I cannot stand the thought of carrying the child of a monster, I’m going to have an abortion before it’s too late. I’m not sure how long I’ve actually been pregnant, but to fit it within the law here in MI, a medicinal abortion can only be performed through the tenth week. After that, it’s lawful for me to have a surgical one through about half of the nineteenth week.” There. She’d said it. She meant it. She couldn’t take the words back. Right?

Debbie jumped from her chair, bumping the table in the process and sloshing the tea from both cups into the saucers under them. “Oh, my. How can you say that with so little feeling?”

“Feeling? I’m past feeling. I need to be rid of anything associated with the nightmares.” Attempting to still an inward tremor before it could work its way out, Candi clenched her fists in her lap. “The horrible things that come back to me and force me to lose all air and faint. I’m so tired of not being able to breathe when I hear the door knocker or other noise, or see a shadow, or—”

With an all-enveloping hug, Debbie squeezed Candi hard. “Before you ever make a decision like that, you need to know what you’re really doing. My friend, Dr. Kate Belmonte, would so love to counsel with you, sugar, but if you can’t deal with that, at the very least discuss this with your brother. Please. He’ll be so devastated if you do something so life-altering without talking it over with him.”

“Don’t you see? Everything that happens to me, happens to him. He’s been solely responsible for me so much of my life. Even now, he hears my nightmares and comes to the rescue.

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