by Nicole Helm
And this was where he came to at the end of every thought. Gestures and gifts didn’t solve the problem. He couldn’t think of anything that would because he didn’t know why the problem had happened. He was trying to fix symptoms of something bigger, but he didn’t know what that something bigger was.
He crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it across the room, which only frustrated him more because paper was hardly a satisfying thing to throw. So, he went about reorganizing his stacks of papers for the who-knew-what-th time.
If he kept looking, he’d find the answers there, in neatly piled stacks and organized thoughts. Lists and calendars held the answer, somewhere, because they were the things he understood.
Except once he’d finished making everything look neat and organized, and he stared down at his desk that had all the right electronics and pens and things, he didn’t feel any of the ordered relief.
Because Sierra still wasn’t here.
He frowned, broken from that horrible train of thought by the creak of a door, and the soft sound of what had to be footsteps.
When Sierra appeared in the doorway to his office, he briefly considered the possibility he’d had a break with reality. Except she looked a little too pale for a fantasy, and her expression was grim rather than happy. Surely if he was losing his mind, it’d at least be with a happy Sierra.
“Hey,” she said, and her voice sounded raw. In fact, everything about her looked a little raw. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, which was rare for her—she didn’t like to leave the house without it. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and sweatpants and her golden hair was pulled back into a haphazard ponytail. But the most disorienting thing was the utter flatness in her brown eyes. A complete lack of spark, which had always been that thing that had drawn him to her.
“You’re back.”
“No.” She let out a bitter laugh. “I’m not back, Carter. You haven’t filed your answer, and I have a life to move on with.”
Carter ignored that and gestured to the armchair in the corner. “Sit. We should talk.” He settled himself at the seat behind his desk. This was perfect, really. A calm, rational sit-down to work this all out.
She stared at his desk, his perfectly arranged papers, but she didn’t sit. She just stood there and stared at his desk as if it was some horrifying foreign object.
“Sit,” he repeated, because maybe she hadn’t heard him. Maybe she needed to be encouraged. “Please.”
“No.” She shook her head, that bitter laugh escaping her mouth again, making him frown. “No, I won’t be doing that.”
“We need to talk,” he emphasized, changing the should to need, because it was a need, not a request.
Her eyes flicked to his, still so flat and blank, and no matter that her laugh was bitter and her frown harsh, her eyes were just…empty. “No, we don’t need to talk. Not anymore. You had months to talk and you didn’t and I’m not going to sit here and having a meeting with you, Dr. McArthur. I won’t be lectured or talked at.”
“Sierra—”
“No.” She hugged her arms around herself and shook her head vigorously. “I won’t do this. Not when you use your father’s exasperated, condescending voice on me. That heavy sigh as you say my name.” Her gaze held his, and there was a tiny spark. Something he didn’t recognize though. Not her usual light. “That isn’t love.”
“I’m not talking about love,” he replied, very calmly and reasonably if he did say so himself.
“Yes, I’m very well aware.”
He closed his eyes in pain for a moment. “That isn’t what I—”
“I’m pregnant,” she said, not giving him a chance to explain anything. She cut off all rational thought with that…bomb.
Pregnant.
He opened his mouth to say something, but he didn’t have words. Throughout his residency and his, albeit still rather short, career as a doctor, he’d had to break all manner of horrible news, and he knew the right words for that.
What words were there for this?
“That night…” She swallowed and it was the first sign of something like nerves. Sierra. Nervous. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her that way. “Well, I hadn’t been taking my pills for a while. There wasn’t much point, was there?”
“That night was a mistake,” he said reflexively. She looked stricken, and he realized she didn’t understand that either. If she’d only give him more time, he wouldn’t be ruining all this. “I didn’t—”
“Well, regardless, I still want the divorce. You’re the baby’s father, so you’ll be involved once he or she is born, but there’s no point in being married while we do it.”
“No…point.” Anger sparked, cautious at first but growing rapidly as if every second that ticked by was a steady dose of oxygen for the blaze. For once, the numbness didn’t win. “Of course there’s a point, damn it. We’re going to have a baby, a child.” A child. His child. He was going to be a father. A father. “Marriage is the point.”
“I’m not your mother, Carter. I have no interest in being miserable for the sake of the children, or whatever her whole life has been about. I didn’t marry you to be a McArthur or to be ignored or silenced or… No. So, I’m going to build a life I love.” She met his gaze, chin tilted, determination in her shoulders-back stance. “Which means not being a McArthur.”
I’m not a McArthur, he wanted to say, but none of this made sense. A child. Divorce. A future. An ending.
“I’m not signing those papers.” It was the one piece of truth in all this chaos. The one stark, black fact in all this gray area. “Filing. Whatever. I’m not divorcing you.”
“I didn’t want to make this ugly, Carter. But I will.”
“We are not getting divorced,” he said, standing so he could have those inches above her. So he could look down at her and make certain she understood. This was his proclamation. They would not do this awful thing she was suggesting.
But she laughed in his face. “Watch us,” she said, and then turned on a heel and walked out of his office.
Chapter Three
“She’s precious,” Sierra said, though her throat felt too tight. The tiniest little bundle in her arms looked like a squished alien, and yet she was precious.
Beckett sat next to Kaitlin on her hospital bed and Sierra and Kaitlin’s parents sat on a little couch in the corner. Their brother, Luke, and his wife, Melanie, stood next to them. They’d all taken turns holding little Ellie.
Sierra didn’t want to let her go, though she knew it was time to leave. Time to face the music.
She wasn’t going back to Kaitlin’s apartment tonight. Well, she supposed it was morning now, a whole new day. The day before had been a whirlwind. The morning with Kaitlin going into labor, Sierra driving to the next town over to get a pregnancy test during the wait for Ellie’s arrival. The box had told her it was too early to tell, and still she’d been determined to see that negative sign and feel some relief even if not total.
But there’d been a positive one instead. Early and everything.
Her life had changed in that Walmart bathroom, and she’d driven straight home to the house she and Carter had shared once upon a time, to tell him. She’d felt no more wishy-washy wondering if she should suck it up, wait him out, whatever.
She’d just known, in that crystal-clear moment of a positive pregnancy test: her life had to change. She was going to have a baby, and even if something happened to it, she didn’t ever want to go back to being the version of herself who’d crawled into a little box the past few months and basically given up.
No. Life was going to change.
As she held the newborn in her arms, she knew she couldn’t even begin to fathom how much. But she was determined to be ready. To be strong. Maybe her whole life had been one of failure, but she would not fail her child. If she promised herself nothing else, it would be that.
Which meant giving Ellie back to her exhausted but joyous parents, telling her own parents she was moving
home for a while, and… Well, she wasn’t ready to tell anyone but Carter about the pregnancy yet. Not so early. But she’d start preparing nonetheless.
“We should let you two get some sleep,” Mom said, a clear nudge in Sierra’s direction to relinquish her hold on the baby. “Well it’s you three now, isn’t it?”
Sierra forced herself to turn to Kaitlin who sat in the hospital bed, puffy face and bags under her eyes, and yet with the kind of contented smile Sierra wanted to find for herself.
She’d never have it with a man who shut her out, who clearly saw her for what she was. She would need to be someone other than what she was for her child, and she couldn’t do that with Carter at her side. He was too perfect, and he’d always remind her of that.
When Ellie began to fuss, Sierra murmured, “Here’s your mama,” and Ellie snuggled into Kaitlin’s chest. Kaitlin met Sierra’s gaze and lifted her eyebrows, a clear question.
Sierra gave a quick nod and Kaitlin reached out and gave her arm a squeeze. Simple as that, her sister was offering support. And to keep quiet about it. A sister Sierra had never been all that kind to. They’d been too different, but it didn’t seem to matter now.
Even in the sadness of knowing she had to move on from Carter and all the failures of the past year, there was a kind of hope in that. Things could change. Things could get better. Maybe not marriage things, but life things.
She shuffled out of the room with her parents and brother and sister-in-law, murmuring goodbyes to the happy couple and the fussing baby. A nurse gave them a kindly smile as she slid through the door while they exited.
Sierra trudged with her family through the hospital and toward the parking lot. She was sure it was just paranoia that it felt like every person they passed in the lobby stared at her.
“We’re over this way,” Luke said, pointing to the far side of the parking lot. The family said their goodbyes and though Sierra was parked somewhere in between the two, she trailed after her parents.
“Um, Mom and Dad. I… Would it be okay if…” She shoved her hands into her coat pockets, too hot in the face with embarrassment to feel the chill of the air around them.
Mom and Dad turned, exchanged one of those old married couple looks that caused a lance of pain to go through Sierra’s chest. Even at their best, she and Carter hadn’t had that.
Mom enveloped her in a hard, warm hug. “Have we really made it this hard for you to say you need to come home?” Mom sounded…hurt, almost. Which was odd. Her parents were always so stoic. She knew what they were feeling based on what they said, not what they sounded like.
“No, I just…”
“We’re sorry things didn’t work out, Sierra,” Dad said, in his same old gruff way, but the words were soft somehow. Her father who’d never been particularly soft. “I know we weren’t exactly supportive, but I hope you know we always support you.”
“Who told you?” she managed to ask.
Mom cleared her throat, twisting her fingers together in a rare sign of unease. “I overheard some nurses talking about… Well, they said Dr. McArthur’s wife was leaving him. At first I thought they meant Gerald, but that seems unlikely and now you’re asking to come home, so…”
“We’re getting divorced,” Sierra forced herself to say, bald and plain, because she couldn’t take her parents trying to convince her she was wrong. Telling her she had to fix things. “I know your feelings on divorce.”
Mom and Dad shared another look.
Dad cleared his throat. “I know we’ve been hard sometimes. It was the way we were raised, the way we thought it best to raise ours. We’re trying to be a little better by you three these days. I don’t support divorce unilaterally, no, but…like I said, Sierra, we’ll always support you.”
“Follow us home. It’s too cold to talk in this parking lot like this. We’ll make you some… Goodness, what time even is it? We’ll eat a meal and you can talk to us and tell us what you need.”
Sierra blinked at her mother. When had her parents changed? Opened and softened? Asked her what she needed?
She frowned a little because she had this horrifying thought all of a sudden that it wasn’t them who had changed. It was her. Like she’d grown up a little and realized the world, and they, weren’t out to get her.
She forced a smile and a nod and headed for her car, where she’d already thrown all the things she’d taken to Kaitlin’s, to follow Mom and Dad home.
But Mom’s words kept bouncing around in her head as she drove through the bizarre morning that felt like it should be night after being in a dark hospital room for a while.
Tell us what you need.
She wanted to. Tell her parents everything so they could fix this for her, but she knew they couldn’t, but worse, so much worse…
What if she didn’t know what she needed?
*
Carter never got drunk. There had been very few times in his life where he’d flirted with the edge of it. The night he’d met Sierra and his wedding night were about it. A little tipsy on alcohol and Sierra, both times. But that was very much it. He was a McArthur, expected to be in control always.
After Sierra had dropped her pregnancy bomb, then sauntered away so certain divorce was an inevitability, Carter had sat at his desk and stared at his lists.
It had been strange to sit there and not want to make new ones. He’d felt empty and numb and filled with zero desire to make a list or fill out a calendar. He couldn’t even find it in himself to do the math to figure out when their baby—baby—would be due.
Sometime around midnight, something inside of him had clicked. Maybe snapped. He’d gotten up, walked straight to the kitchen, found a sealed, expensive bottle of liquor his father had given him for some occasion or other. Carter didn’t even bother to read the label to see what kind it was.
He just started to drink. Right out of the bottle. There wasn’t much point to stopping either. There was no one to perform for. It didn’t matter if he got drunk because there was literally no one here who cared what he did.
Something cracked inside of him, only it wasn’t all that painful. Maybe it was the booze running though his system, but it almost felt freeing. He didn’t have to be perfect for his father—who wasn’t even his father. His mother had two other children to rely on now that Cole was home for good, and quite frankly, they were the children she hadn’t lied to their whole lives.
And Sierra was gone. Pregnant with his child and intent on divorce.
It didn’t make any sense. Alcohol didn’t either, he supposed, but the addition of quite a bit of it into his system made that seem rather funny instead of soul-crushingly awful. He managed to drink his way through a good three-fourths of the bottle over the course of the evening.
He watched the sun rise through the kitchen window in a drunken stupor and then figured he might as well burn all his plans. They were ash anyway. Luckily, the living room fireplace only required the flip of a switch and he had a nice little blaze.
Sierra had complained about the gas fireplace, saying a wood-burning one was so much more authentic.
“But it doesn’t do for the drunken burning of things, does it, babe?” Carter said into the empty room, grabbing a handful of the lists and printed papers off his desk. He marched back to the living room where the fire danced easily if not authentically.
He dropped the papers on the floor, then picked up one sheet of paper. The second-honeymoon ideas. He tossed it in. Then his calendar where he’d planned out a timetable of when he’d win her back by.
Goodbye, calendar. Goodbye, lists. Goodbye, life.
It was very lucky he was drunk, because he didn’t have the wherewithal to panic at the fact his life was over and gone. He didn’t have to worry it felt that way even though he had a job—an important job. The kind of job only people like him could do.
Except he’d believed that because of all that McArthur blood coursing through his veins. He’d believed he was offering a service to the worl
d because that was the McArthur way.
He wasn’t a McArthur.
He wasn’t a McArthur.
Months of that sentence marching around inside of him, and he’d never allowed himself to fully form the words. Say it. He’d been too numb, too horrified. So he’d simply let it sit there on the edges, much like Sierra.
“I’m not a McArthur,” he forced himself to say aloud and into the fire.
Carter slowly lowered himself to the floor, something horrible and clawing working through him. An emotion he couldn’t push away, something like a sob if he was the kind of man who cried. The kind of man who broke.
But he wasn’t that. Except when he rubbed his hands over his face, sitting on the cold floor with the heat of his fake fire on his face, his palms came away wet, and that horrible, clawing feeling dug in deeper and worse.
So, alcohol was in fact a terrible idea. No more of that. No, he should have thrown himself into work. That was familiar. That wasn’t dangerous or confronting. It didn’t bring all his shields down and force him to face an ugly truth that he’d messed this all up on his own.
It took three rings of the doorbell for him to realize that’s what the sound was. He managed to crawl to his feet and stumble to the front door.
There seemed to be two or three doorknobs to choose from, which of course wasn’t possible, and still he couldn’t focus enough to get a hand on the knob on the first try.
Third time was the charm and he managed to swing the door open. In his drunken state, he didn’t know who to expect. The couple before him in the soft morning light was at the bottom of that nonexistent list though.
His brother stood on his stoop, Jess standing next to him. It was so strange to stand here and realize he was more like Jess than Cole. Jess had been a foster kid who’d befriended Cole in high school, and because of her nursing aspirations, Dad had taken her under his wing.
Carter might as well be a foster kid to his father, meanwhile Cole—the screw-up rodeo star who’d refused everything Dad had tried to mold him into—was actually a McArthur.