Frankie pushed the sour-smelling covers back. Without making eye contact with her friends （she couldn’t look at them without thinking of Rye）， she got out of bed. Love and pain and humiliation almost toppled her again.
She felt so stupid. Hadn’t Ethel warned her early on? The men here, they lie and they die.
She walked to the bathroom and ran a steaming-hot shower and stepped underneath the hot flow, let it pound her while she cried.
In the empty kitchen, her Gunne Sax dress hung limply from a high cupboard. She couldn’t look at it, so she turned and went outside.
Barb and Ethel were in the backyard, which had been transformed for this weekend’s ceremony. Folding chairs—eleven of them, for Frankie’s parents, Barb and Ethel and Noah and Cecily, and Henry’s small family—had been set up in front of a rented wooden arch, which Mom had insisted on festooning with white roses. As if Frankie were a naive debutante instead of a pregnant war veteran.
Two days ago, she’d been almost excited to marry Henry Acevedo and have his baby and start a new life.
Today she couldn’t imagine any of that.
Barb got out of the chair and came toward her. Ethel followed suit.
“Henry loves you, Frank,” Ethel said. “That’s obvious.”
“Do you love him?” Barb dared to ask.
The words submerged Frankie again, left her unable to straighten or breathe. She knew they would support her, these women, her best friends who had flown here at a moment’s notice and were equally ready to stand at the altar with her or stand by her if she canceled the ceremony.
They loved her, were here for her.
But she didn’t want them here now, didn’t want to see their pity.
Away.
That was what she wanted. A place to hide.
“If you don’t get married,” Ethel said tentatively, “come back to Virginia with me. The bunkhouse is still empty. Noah will love you and Cecily needs an aunt to play with.”
“Or to Chicago with me,” Barb said.
They were offering her paths, lives. They had no idea how broken she felt by Rye’s betrayal.
But her feelings weren’t the most important anymore. She was going to be a mother.
“I’ll marry Henry on Saturday,” she said quietly. What choice did she have? “He’ll be a great father. Our baby deserves that.”
She knew what the right thing to do was. If there was one true thing in her life, it was that she always knew the right thing, and did it. Even when it hurt so much she couldn’t breathe.
Rye had betrayed her. Didn’t love her.
Henry loved her and their baby and wanted to create a family. The baby deserved that chance, and Frankie owed everything to her unborn baby.
“You sure?” Barb asked, reaching out to squeeze Frankie’s upper arm.
Frankie looked at her two best friends. “I’m going to be a mom,” Frankie said. “I guess my choices have to start there from now on.”
“Then this is our bridal party. Let’s get it on,” Ethel said. She went back into the living room, cranked up the stereo, and opened the patio doors.
The familiar notes of “California Girls” drifted into the backyard.
“This song always reminds me of Frankie’s first day at the Thirty-Sixth,” Barb said to Ethel, pulling Frankie to dance with her on the patio. “Her eyes were so big they looked like burnt holes in my mama’s best sheet.”
“You guys stripped down to bloody bras and panties in front of me,” Frankie said. “I thought I’d landed on the moon.”
The music changed again. Born to be w-i-i-i-ld …
Halfway through the song, Frankie felt a cramp in her stomach. First a tightening, then a pain so sharp she gasped.
A rush of wetness dampened her underwear. She put a hand down her panties. When she brought her hand back up, it was covered in blood.
Someone knocked on the door. Before anyone could answer, the front door opened. Henry walked into the backyard. “Hey, gals, that’s some good music, and—”
He saw the blood.
Frankie looked at him. “This can’t be happening. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Henry bounded into action, sweeping Frankie into his arms, carrying her out to the car, settling her in the passenger seat. He backed out of the driveway so fast, Frankie smelled burning rubber.
He sped up to the Coronado hospital emergency entrance and slammed on the brakes.
Lifting Frankie out of the car, carrying her into the bright white emergency room, he shouted, “We need help here. My fiancée is pregnant and something is wrong.”