CONCORD, N.C. _ Forget everything else.
All the half-screwed mascara tubes, the still-warm hairdryers. The little makeup pencils and brushes, and the hair products littered throughout the Las Vegas hotel room. Twenty minutes before NASCAR's postseason awards banquet in November, none of that mattered anymore.
Just the phone call.
Samantha Busch picked it up. Doctors had the results of her blood work from earlier that morning _ and delivered news she prayed would never come, but already sensed would.
Her baby girl, the one still burrowed in her belly, was gone. The miscarriage was official.
She grabbed her husband, NASCAR star Kyle Busch, and ushered him into the bathroom, away from their business manager and a hair and makeup girl still in the room. She relayed the news, and then, told him what she wanted to do next:
I don't want to talk about it. I'm not ready. We're not going to face it. We're going to go downstairs and pretend everything is fine.
So that's exactly what they did. They walked the red carpet, posed for photos. And every time someone came up to Samantha _ Congratulations on the pregnancy! _ she took it in stride and thanked them.
"It was hard to hear, but I also wasn't ready to give it up yet," Samantha told the Observer. "You know what I mean? I was still kind of in that mindset of, I'm not going to accept it yet. 'Thank you, thank you,' because I am still pregnant, but it was just a very weird state of emotions and shock.
"And I didn't want to be separated from Kyle. Being alone in that hotel room would've probably killed me."
So they sauntered to their seats and for the next two hours played make-believe. Pretended their world, which was crashing down, was fine. They clapped, congratulated new champion Joey Logano and his wife, Brittany, and sat through the entire ceremony. And then, as soon as they could, they left.
