Recap of previous chapter: Sookie remembers the first day she met Eric, when he came to the diner to ask whether he could see her antique saltbox house. Eric played coy with her, not letting her off the hook for grabbing his crotch, but got his own taste of April Fools' Day. Back to the present, in the hospital, Sookie calls the only number she has for Eric, at his architecture firm in Boston, and hears a voice answering, "Leclerq and Associates."

A few things to know about New England that are referenced in this chapter:
The Big Dig was an enormous roadway project that included digging a tunnel to reroute traffic under the city of Boston.
A bubbler/bubblah is a water fountain.
A clicker/clickah is a TV remote.
A frappe is a blended drink with ice cream, milk, and flavoring.
The Freedom Trail is a 2.5-mile painted red line/brick walkway running through the city that directs visitors to 16 historical sites, such as the Paul Revere house.
No sir/no suh means "I don't believe it."
Pisser/pissah means "awesome;" usually it's preceded by wicked.
Tonic is soda.

And last, but not least, thanks to makesmyheadspin, for catching an overabundance of 'thats' in this chapter, for putting up with all of my tweaked revisions, and for giving me this advice: Never apologize for adding more 'Eric.' Hope you enjoy...

Chapter 4: Keep Your Friends Close

"Leclerq & Associates," the man's voice insisted, repeating itself.

"H-hello," I stammered, noticing the conspicuous absence of the name 'Northman' in the agency's title. "I, I'd like to speak with Eric Northman, please."

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Northman is no longer an associate of our agency." He spoke in a clipped, business-like tone, in the same sort of way a catalogue salesperson might tell me the sweater I had wanted in medium was not available in red. Without prompting, he added, "At this time, I am not able to provide any forwarding information."

"He's not still working there?" I had heard the man the first time, but the unexpected news had bounced off my brain. I wasn't ready to let it sink in just yet.

"No." Nothing about his tone softened the news, and worse still, he was giving me no hook to grab onto for more details.

"Is he still in the Boston area?"

"I have no information regarding his whereabouts." He wasn't wavering. In fact, he seemed about as intractable as rush hour traffic through the Big Dig. In the background, I could hear the distinct sound of the tapping of a keyboard.

Probing for anything—any little clue—I asked, "Is he still working as an architect?"

"I have no information regarding his activities."

"Hmmm…can you tell me when he left your agency?"

"As I have said, I am not able to provide any other information at this time." Now the voice was annoyed.

I was running out of inane questions, but wasn't ready to give up yet. "Do you know anyone I might be able to contact who would know where he is now?"

"I'm not at liberty to divulge any information regarding the agency's business and personal contacts. May I help you with anything else?"

My time was running out. I was lucky he hadn't already hung up on me. He didn't sound like the chatty kind of guy, but maybe I could loosen him up with a little banter. "I'm sorry. I didn't get your name?"

"Andre."

"Andre, my name is Sookie Stackhouse…"

"Sookie Stackhouse?"

"Yes."

"One moment please."

What?

The phone clicked and then a woman's voice spoke. "Ms. Stackhouse?"

"Yes."

"My name is Sophie-Anne Leclerq. I understand you are looking for Mr. Northman."

"Yes. It's important. Could you tell me how to get in touch with him or at least pass along a message that I called?"

She ignored me. "How do you know Mr. Northman?"

Now I had the distinct impression that I was the one being worked over for information. "Uh…we're personal acquaintances."

"Personal?"

"Y-Yes." I faltered. He's the father of my baby.

"And you've known each other since…"

Was this a fill-in-the blank interrogation? Suddenly I was wary of revealing anything important. The trouble was, I didn't know what would be important to her and how she might use that information. I hedged, "Since last year."

"Last year, since about what time?"

"Eric isn't in any kind of trouble or sick is he?"

"Hmm...no." She answered as if it were not a yes-no kind of question. Then immediately she took control of the questioning again. "When was the last time you spoke with Mr. Northman?"

"I…I don't know."

Her silence made me squirm. "A while ago. Months."

"And you haven't spoken to him since then?"

"No. I'm sorry to have troubled you. I won't take any more of your time."

"Yes, well I'm sorry I can't help you."

"Please just tell him that Sookie is trying to get in touch with him."

"And your contact information?"

"He knows it."

"Yes, I'm sure he does. Very well, then. Anything else I can do for you?'

I'm sure he does?

"No. That's all. Thank you." And immediately I hung up.

I sat there, motionless.

The world inside and out was a muffled kind of quiet then. The chatter in my head, the shush of crying babies, the squeak and clack of wheeled motion in the hallway, the unsteady beat of scattered footsteps, the tinned call of hospital codes—all of it—faded far, far away. It was the kind of quiet that comes from a deep snowfall, when even the rumble of an oncoming plow goes unnoticed until it is right upon you.

I had expected Eric to be there.

Though I'd been untethered for months, only then did I feel like I would just float away.

"Aw, come on. Don't be like that. Come back." Eric tugged on my arm, trying to pull me back into the playful discussion we were having about New England words and expressions.

"No, no. If that's the way you feel about it." I feigned annoyance. The silly/lighthearted side of him often hid in the shadows, rarely making a show, and coaxing it out of him made me feel, well… powerful.

"You have to admit that 'frappe' is a strange word for New England. You say things like 'no suh' and 'pissah' and 'clickah'' and then the word 'frappe' comes out of your mouths. It just doesn't fit."

"Oooh. I don't like where this is going! Are you saying we're unsophisticated?" On any other occasion, I might have been insulted. But, hey, I could take a joke, and besides that, he'd tossed me a treat: that impish grin of his. I wanted to kiss it right off his face. Hell, I could devour all of him.

"Hmm?" I repeated, "Are you saying we're unsophisticated?"

"Well…"

"And wait a minute! Who are you referring to? Are you talking about me? What about you?"

"I wasn't born here, Yankee."

"So you're disavowing your New England ties?"

He pulled me in closer, tickling at my waist, which is when I knew I had him. I reached down to rest my hands on top of his, pressing them in place.

His breath hitched. Yep. I had him right where I wanted him.

"All right," he offered, "I'll give you 'tonic' for 'soda' and 'bubbler' for water fountain if you concede that 'frappe' is out of the Yankee character."

To be honest, the word 'frappe' kind of annoyed me too, but for a different reason. At the diner, tourists were always asking for 'milkshakes,' when what they really wanted were 'frappes.' 'Milkshakes' were just milk with flavoring, shaken. 'Frappes' had ice cream too. It was a constant source of confusion.

Eric's hands had firmly hooked themselves in the small of my waist, right where he liked to feel the flare of my hips. When things got hot and steamy between us, this little nook was where he would hold firm.

"So, what were you saying?" I prompted him.

"Hmm," he drew me in even closer by my waist as he leaned his face toward mine. The words he would speak would soon flutter across my cheek.

"How about we get naked and then maybe later I'll take you out for a frappe?"

"Sooks! Today is the big day! I'm here to bust you out." Tara came breezing into my hospital room.

Just seeing my friend was enough to trigger the tears that hadn't been shed for the upsetting phone call.

"Oh, no! What's wrong?"

I wasn't ready to tell Tara everything, but as I struggled to find the words to explain myself, suddenly the weight of what I was about to face with E.J. bore down on me. When I'd convinced myself I could do this single parent thing, I had been fully committed to doing it. Maybe I had had unrealistic expectations of myself. But now that I had decided to try to find Eric—and he wasn't there—I was starting to panic. Blasted post-partum hormones probably weren't helping either.

"I don't know if I can handle this." Immediately I started to lose it, skipping over silent tears, right over delicate sobs, and leaping into ugly cry territory.

"Stop!" Tara unleashed a verbal equivalent of a slap in the face. "Hold on, hold on here. I know, I know. I'm supposed to listen and empathize and- yaddah, yaddah, yaddah—whatever else they teach you in those social work classes of yours, but I'm telling you right now, you've gotta take this one step at a time. All we're doing today is leaving the hospital and going home. That's all. And you're not alone. You have friends who want to help. If you let them."

That last pointed dig didn't escape my attention. She handed me a box of tissues and waited for me to clean myself up.

"Also, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but Jason is at your house planning a little welcome home party."

I laughed. "There's a scary thought."

"Okay then. Let's worry about what Jason is cooking up in your kitchen right now. It looked like he had all the ingredients for American chop suey."

I grimaced. "Listen, there is something you could do for me."

"You name it."

I held up a small cardboard box. "Inside this box is the most awesome invention of mankind since the birth of our species."

"Do I want to know?"

"Probably not."

"Then don't tell me."

"Here's the catch. The nurses around here dole these things out like they're a commodity. I already have a few extras stashed in my suitcase, but I'd like you to go on a scouting mission next door and see whether the mom who just got discharged left any behind."

"Okay, but only because I love you."

I turned back to the window, calmer now, and looked out across the parking lot toward the adjacent park. Bright light, summer-like in its intensity, was glaring through the still naked trees, casting harsh, jagged shadows on the barren ground.

"You're late, aren't you?" Tara had asked me point-blank.

"What?" I asked, though there was no sense playing stupid with Tara. If anyone knew me, she did.

We had driven up to the White Mountains, supposedly for a simple overnight girls' get-away camping trip. JB had been planning a poker night and had banned me from the table. Now, seeing Tara's intense look at me, across the fire pit, I wondered whether she had brought me here for this very purpose.

"You're late, aren't you?"

"Yes," I whispered, as though someone might overhear us. "How did you know?"

"Sookie, how did I know? How did I know? How could I not know? You've been passing off some stomach bug excuse for almost a month now. You've barely touched your wine. And you haven't been yourself in forever."

I didn't know what to say. There was no escaping Tara.

"You haven't taken a pregnancy test yet, have you?"

"What?"

"A pregnancy test."

"I…" I couldn't finish my sentence. Couldn't tell her what I was really thinking. I was certain to the core what the results would say, and I was desperately hanging onto every last ounce of summer.

She rolled her eyes. "You know what they say. 'Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.'" She reached into her duffle bag, pulled out a box, and tossed it over to me.

The package sailed through the air, its letters "e" and "p" and "t" spinning wildly, circling and rotating in slow motion before landing right in my lap.

"Good aim." I snickered.

And with that, the tension broke. Doubled over in laughter, I sputtered, " Da Nile?" and "Hey, Tara, have any LPTs? Any late pregnancy tests?"

"Go on! Go on!" she gasped, shooing me with her arms. "You're not getting out of this. I picked this campsite specifically for the location of that bush over there."

In the dark, still laughing, I stumbled into the bushes with a flashlight, tore open the package, and opened up the directions. "Three minutes," it said. "Most accurate with morning urine," it said. But that probably only applied to women who just missed a period, when pregnancy hormones were just starting to build.

And that only applied to women who didn't already know with every nerve cell that she was pregnant.

I pulled off the cap to the test stick and squatted to pee, tucking the flashlight under my chin. By the time I got back to the warm glow of the campfire, a plus sign already had appeared.

"Well, there you have it," I flashed it briefly at Tara before tossing it into the fire, where it immediately ignited and cast a blue-green flame. I watched morosely for a moment as it started to melt and drip. Not knowing what else to do with myself, I reached out to recapture a meager scrap of humor, anything to take the sting off the moment.

"So, what else do you have in that bag of yours, Tara? Wanna check my cholesterol? Run a colon cancer screen? Not to put any pressure on you or anything, but some of my other girlfriends treat me to makeover parties. You know- manicures, facials, and things like that."

Tara didn't miss a beat. "Here's what I have planned for us tomorrow, Sookie. Let's take a ride over to the Old Man viewing area." She laughed raucously.

"Hunh?" I seemed to be missing the joke. The Old Man was a granite ledge that jutted out from the side of a mountain that looked like, well, an old man. It was a popular tourist destination.

"You know…the Old Man."

I still wasn't getting it.

She twirled her arms impatiently at me. "You know, he fell off the side of the mountain."

"What? He's gone?"

"Yeah. There one day. Gone the next."

"No way!"

"Way!"

"Where'd he go?"

We were both laughing now, hysterically, rolling on the ground.

"Can you imagine the park ranger that day?"

"Yeah. Talk about a bad day at work."

Tara took a deep, wheezing breath. "People even showed up at the viewing area and put flowers down."

I gasped, the wind suddenly knocked out of me.

And just like that, the mood turned on me, crashed down like a cracked granite ledge that had clung to the side of a cliff for only so long before giving way. I shook with great big gulping sobs that thundered and rumbled in my chest. Tara had the presence to sit quietly, rubbing my back until we both fell asleep.

We slept late the next morning, shielded from the sunrise by the shadows cast by the towering mountains around us. All the while, the sun rose high in the sky, gaining strength, before finally erupting over the mountain peaks at full force. I longed for the slow, gentle warm-up of a sunrise over the ocean. But even I knew that at home, the sun was already at high noon.

"Score!" Tara called from the doorway.

Looking up, I noticed she was juggling an armful of boxes.

"Tara, I love you. You're the best."

"You know I'll do anything for you, but don't ever again ask me to steal…" she paused to read the printing, "...per-i-ne-al cool pads."

"Deal. I owe you."

I leaned over to hug her, and as soon as I felt her warm embrace, I knew I owed her for much more. I'd neglected our friendship over the past nine months, even longer including the time I'd been wrapped up in a summer fling with Eric. The whole time she'd been there for me, mostly on the sidelines, waiting to help whenever I'd accept it. I couldn't assume that she'd be there forever.

"Tara, I owe you an apology."

She rolled her eyes, a habit that had gotten her into trouble on more than one occasion. "Sookie, I already told you I forgive you for that time you dragged me from one end of the Freedom Trail to the other."

"I mean it. I know I've been secretive about a lot of things lately, but it hasn't been because I don't trust you or because I don't think you could help, or anything having to do with you." That last part was a bit of a lie. Tara's help often was not doled out in small quantities or subtle ways. The image of her using a sledge hammer to install a picture hook came to mind.

"Go on. Go on and play the pregnancy card."

It was my turn to roll my eyes. "Tara, listen to me. I'm being serious. Yes, this pregnancy has taken over all of my attention. I have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to handle all of this. It's something only I can do. But I'm still sorry I haven't been around much. I miss you."

"You don't have to do it alone."

I winced. I knew her feelings had been hurt. She had wanted to help all along, and frankly the biggest testament to our friendship had been that she'd been able to hold back.

"And I'm just figuring that out now. I mean, thank you."

At that moment, a nurse popped her head in the doorway to remind me to feed E.J.. I'd needed to feed him every two hours because he'd become jaundiced. Tara got up to wheel his bassinette closer. I contemplated whether to stay put or move back to the bed, but just the thought of getting up quickly convinced me.

"Would you mind handing him to me?"

Tara's eyes opened wide as she squealed, "You mean I can hold him?"

I startled. "You haven't had a chance yet?" I realized, once again, how much I had been withholding from her.

Tara was already scooping up E.J.. Swaddled in his blanket, he fit in her arms like a little baby burrito. I watched as her face and shoulders relaxed and she started gently swaying.

"You're a natural," I teased.

"He's so sweet. Look at his pouty little mouth."

"Pull his cap off," I urged, feeling like a boastful mother.

Tara gasped as his spiky hair sprang to life.

Loosened up by all of the warm, fuzzy feelings E.J. had brought out, I blurted, "His real name is Eric Jason. That's what E.J. stands for. But you're the only one who knows."

"Eric? Is he the father?"

I nodded.

"How did you meet him?"

"He's an architect who came looking for me to see my house."

"Wait a minute…is he the guy whose crotch you grabbed last April Fools' Day?"

My heart was thundering now, as more parts of the story I had worked hard to keep contained were loosening, leaving my control. Tara not only knew his name, but something else about his identity. "Yes. But again, you're the only one who knows."

"And you had a thing with him?"

"It was a little more than a thing. We saw each other all last summer."

Tara's eyebrows raised. She'd held herself at bay for a long time, and now given the opportunity, she could barely control her curiosity. "I knew you were up to something."

"Guilty as charged."

"Why'd you keep it a secret?" Her questions, I knew, would get only blunter.

I sighed. "I'm not sure exactly, to be honest with you. I had my reasons at the time. I was still recovering from L.L. and Quinn. I didn't want another big public humiliation. An illicit summer fling with a hot guy sounded like fun. No strings attached."

"Hmmph," she chuckled.

"Yeah. Right." I added glumly.

"So now what?"

"I just tried calling his father today. He wasn't there."

"He doesn't know yet?"

I shook my head. Tara whistled softly.

"The problem is I don't know how to reach him," I heard my voice waver, trailing off. How the very largeness of Eric had managed to blink out remained unfathomable to me.

E.J. was starting to stir in Tara's arms. She passed him down to me, watching as I got him settled in place.

"We'll figure it out." She backed off, giving what had been revealed between us time to settle. And I felt bolstered, knowing I didn't have to do this alone.

A/N Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer: All SVM characters belong to Charlaine Harris, and I am not receiving any monetary compensation through their use. I'm just taking them on a tour of New England.