Page 46 of A New Chapter in Rosewood Beach

“Mom!” Hazel gasped out in surprise as soon as she saw Vivian and Terrence looking the way they did. “What—what happened?”

Vivian laughed and threw herself into a chair. “The ocean tried to eat us.”

“You fell out of a boat?” Dean said, looking as though he was trying not to laugh.

“We did.” Terrence nodded with a wry smile.

“It was my fault,” Vivian said.

“No, not at all,” Terrence corrected her gently. “I should have warned you that I was planning on standing up like that. Or, I should have made sure that you’d heard me before I actually stood up.”

Everyone laughed, especially Vivian.

“Oh, Terrence, you’re a sweetheart,” she said. “Someday we’ll have to go kayaking again so I can redeem myself.”

“Sounds wonderful.” Terrence’s eyes warmed.

“You went kayaking, huh?” Julia asked with a grin. “That sounds very adventurous.”

“Perhaps a little too much so,” Vivian said, noticing a tendril of seaweed that was clinging to the knee of her dress and flicking it off.

“We were on the kayak when we got Hazel’s call,” Terrence said. “In our hurry to come back, we tipped over the kayak.”

“Oh no.” Hazel held her hand up to her mouth, hiding a laugh.

“How’s she doing? Any updates?” Vivian asked.

“Not really,” Julia said. “She’s still in labor, but last we heard, everything was going well.”

Vivian nodded. A quiet came over their group, as if they felt that they could listen quietly and be able to hear what was going on in Alexis’s delivery room. They couldn’t, of course—all they could hear were the sounds of the hospital fans whirring and Hazel’s knitting needles clicking. Vivian glanced at her daughter’s hands and saw that Hazel was knitting a pair of tiny yellow baby socks.

“We should take bets on what gender the baby will be,” Samantha said, looking up from her book.

“Definitely a boy,” Dean said. “I can feel it in my bones.”

“It’s a girl.” Julia shook her head.

“I say girl too,” Samantha said.

“You were saying boy on the car ride here,” Hazel said with a laugh.

Samantha shrugged. “Now I say girl.”

Vivian smiled. She absolutely could not wait to find out whether Alexis and Grayson were having a boy or a girl, but she would be just as excited no matter what the gender was. She had loved raising a boy and she had loved raising her girls, and she knew that as a grandmother, she would enjoy all the same kinds of activities with her grandchild that she’d loved to do with her kids as a mother.

There was another lull in the conversation. Julia went back to pacing, and Cooper and Dean tried to focus on a chess game. Samantha read her book—although her feet were wiggling under her chair as if she wasn’t really focusing on it—and Hazel went back to knitting at a whirlwind speed. Jacob was on his phone, and Noelle was reading on a Kindle.

“I’m nervous,” Vivian said, turning to Terrence with a smile. “The waiting is always nerve-wracking, even when things are going well.”

“It’ll all be okay,” he assured her warmly, and took her hand in his. He stroked her thumb reassuringly, and she felt so many butterflies in her chest that for a moment all she could think about was the fact that he was holding her hand.

She was just beginning to notice her surroundings again when a nurse wearing pink scrubs appeared in a doorway.

“Owens family? You’ve got a new member.” The nurse grinned, looking delighted by the joy that sprang onto their faces. “Mom is doing great. You’re welcome to come back in pairs to see her and meet the baby.”

“Mom goes first,” Julia said, turning to her mother with a radiant smile.

“And Terrence should go with her,” Dean said.

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