“We’re going to find you a new doctor,” he said as he tucked her into bed. “That one doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Don’t worry, Becca.” He leaned down to kiss her on the forehead. “It’s going to be all right.”
But Rebecca knew with a shocking, shrill clarity that it wasn’t going to be all right, that she was going to lose her baby, and after that, nothing would be the same again.
Pastura, New Mexico—137 Miles to Albuquerque
Rebecca didn’t know what had made Cait change her mind, and right now she didn’t care. She was too worn out with exhaustion and fear and relief to feel anything other than numb.
It had been nearly half an hour, and the pickup hadn’t reappeared. Maybe Cait really had lost him with that headlight trick. Maybe they’d never know who was behind the wheel. She didn’t care. All that mattered was that they were on their way to Albuquerque. By this time tomorrow, she’d be back in her bed in Lubbock, this whole nightmare would be over, and she could begin the long, impossible work of piecing her shattered heart back together.
Patrick’s voice pushed into her head. Just believe, baby. Just believe.
“Do you believe in miracles?” She hadn’t realized she was going to ask the question until it came out of her mouth.
Cait looked at her for a moment and finally shook her head. “No, but my mom does. When I was a kid, she used to find signs from God everywhere: a rainbow after a storm, or a single flower blooming in the middle of winter. She’d point them out to me and tell me that they were God’s way of telling us that He was looking out for us. My grandma used to do that, too, only with feathers. She thought they were signs from her own mother. Every time she came across one, she’d pick it up and turn her eyes to the sky and say, ‘Hi, Momma. Hope you’re doing fine.’” Cait smiled at the memory. “What about you?” she asked.
“My mother did, too.” Rebecca took a breath. “She died when I was eighteen.”
“Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
“Have you ever seen someone die of cancer?”
Cait shook her head.
“I hope you never do. It eats them from the inside until there’s nothing left of them. Cancer ate my mother slowly at first, over the course of a year, and then suddenly, all at once, in two weeks. By the end of it, she looked like a skeleton lying in that bed. Her hair was gone, and her lips bled all the time, and she was in constant, constant pain.” Rebecca closed her eyes against the memory. “All through it, she kept telling me that a miracle would save her. The priest came and blessed her with holy water, and she bought stuff online—special teas and oils and salves that were supposedly infused with some kind of magical healing powers but were really just a bunch of junk. She prayed all the time for salvation, and she held out hope until the very last day that God was going to save her.” Rebecca’s face was wet with tears, and Cait fought the urge to reach out and wipe them away. “She died thinking that she’d been abandoned by her God. She didn’t find peace. She fought it the whole way down, and when it finally claimed her, you know what she thought?”
“What?” Cait whispered.
“She thought it was her own fault. That if she’d just prayed a little harder, or believed a little bit more, that she would have been saved.” Rebecca shook her head. “Of course, nothing could save her. She died just shy of her forty-fifth birthday.”
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry.” Cait was silent for a minute. “I’ve never believed in miracles.”
“Neither do I.” Rebecca stared at her reflection in the window. “The baby’s sick,” she said finally. “She has a condition that means she won’t survive, at least not for more than a few days, and those days that she could live . . .” She closed her eyes. “It wouldn’t be any kind of life I’d wish for her. That’s why I’m doing this.”
Cait’s face crumpled. “Oh, God. I’m—I’m so sorry.”
Rebecca smiled sadly. “Me, too.”
She could see Cait working to piece things together. “So your husband doesn’t know that the baby is sick?”
“He knows.” Rebecca shook her head. “He’s a great believer in miracles, my husband, and he believes our baby will be a miracle.”
“And you don’t?”
She shook her head again. “I know better.”
Eleven Days Earlier
Patrick knelt next to the bed and wrapped his arms around Rebecca. “Baby, please. You just have to have faith.”
Three doctors’ visits in three days, and all of them said the same thing: there was no hope for their baby. She would die, either before she was born or during childbirth. If she did manage to survive the birth—which would be a “miracle,” one doctor said, though Rebecca wished he hadn’t used that word—the baby’s life would be short. A few hours, maybe a day. And then she would be taken from them.
“There was a child,” Patrick was saying now, “in France. I read about him online. He had the same condition, and he lived until he was three years old.” He squeezed her hands. “We could have three years, Becs. Maybe more.”
She had read that same article and countless others. Women who had carried their babies to term, tugged down on their foreheads the little woolen hats they’d knitted, kissed them and held them until they died. She couldn’t do this. She knew that it would break her, even more than she was already broken. She knew that she would never recover.
“I can’t do it,” she said, and Patrick sank his head into his hands.
So maybe she was a coward.
No, that wasn’t it. Or wasn’t all of it. She knew that this loss would break her either way, that she would never be able to gather together the splintered pieces of her heart and make them whole again. As soon as her doctor had said those words—“I’m sorry”—she’d known that she was being banished to a shadow world.
If she believed that her child would be able to experience even a moment of happiness on this earth, she would give it to her. Her baby wouldn’t be able to hear her, or see her, even feel her touch. She would be born into a cold, blank world, kept apart from her love, and then she would die.
At least for now, she could keep her baby safe and warm. And at least for now, she could decide the kind of death she wanted for her baby. One that kept her warm and safe inside of her up until the last possible moment.
Patrick believed in miracles, and he believed in his ability to conjure them into being. He had faith, her husband. In God. In fate. In himself. It was one of the things she loved about him.
But she had no use for faith right now, or God, or miracles. None of that mattered. None of that was real. What was real was the child growing inside of her, as irreparably broken as her own heart.
And it was up to her, her mother, to be merciful, and to deliver her into grace.
Arabella, New Mexico—125 Miles to Albuquerque
Cait sneaked a glance at Rebecca. Her eyes were closed, her face turned toward the window. She looked so small in the Jeep’s seat, so frail . . .
Cait’s eyes trailed to the tape recorder under the dash. If she listened hard enough, she would swear she heard the gears whirring. What sort of person would plan something like that? An awful one. One who deserved all the shit life had thrown at her and then some. She was the traitor, not Rebecca. She’d misled this woman, maybe even put her in harm’s way. How could she know for certain that the man in the pickup truck wasn’t coming for Rebecca? There were enough people in this world who wanted to see her dead. More than enough.
She tried to imagine the moment when Lisa realized that Cait had picked up Rebecca for the drive, not Pat. She would be furious, rightfully so. Cait had let her down, badly, and had betrayed the trust that was central to the Sisters of Service. She had thought she’d been so clever, too. That was always her downfall. When would she realize that?
She’d been in the office with Lisa when the call had come in. She could tell right away that something was up by the way Lisa pivoted her body away as she bent over the phone. “Of course,” L
isa had said soothingly. “We guarantee anonymity.” Cait watched her scribble something down on a notepad and underline it twice. “We’ll be in touch as soon as we’ve made arrangements,” Lisa said, and hung up the phone.
Cait’s journalism professor had stressed the importance of learning how to read upside down—“An invaluable way to glean information from unsuspecting subjects”—so she’d nearly had a heart attack when she read the name Rebecca McRae in Lisa’s precise writing. “Is that the Rebecca McRae?” she asked, but Lisa just shook her head and closed the notebook.
“Forget about it,” she said. “You know the rules.”
Of course she did. Drivers were prohibited from having personal connections with the clients. And her connection to Rebecca . . . well, it could definitely be described as personal in Cait’s eyes. Which was why, after Lisa returned Rebecca’s call to confirm that Pat would be driving her to the clinic in Albuquerque in a week’s time, she knew she had to act fast. When she first asked Pat to swap clients, Pat balked at the idea, but once Cait pointed out that her own drive was much shorter—just a routine one from the Austin suburbs to the clinic—and that Pat’s would be overnight . . . well, it didn’t take much more convincing. Cait promised she’d tell Lisa about the schedule change, but it conveniently slipped her memory.
Yes, her days with the Sisters of Service were definitely over.
She hated herself sometimes. She really did.
Rebecca’s eyes stuttered open. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Not long,” Cait said, glancing at the clock. “Maybe ten minutes or so.”
“Any sign of him?”
She shook her head. “Plain sailing so far. I think we’ll be in Santa Rosa pretty soon. We can figure out the route to Albuquerque then.”
“I really appreciate you doing this,” Rebecca said quietly. “I know I’m asking a lot of you to keep going. I honestly can’t thank you enough.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Cait said, flushing with shame. She didn’t deserve this woman’s gratitude, not after what she had planned.
“Well, I mean it. Thank you.” Rebecca stretched her arms above her head and let out a yawn. “Do you have any gum? I thought I had some in my bag, but I can’t seem to find it.”
“Sure, there should be some in that little cubbyhole under the dashboard.” As soon as she said it, a flash of white-hot terror. What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion. Rebecca’s hand reaching for the pack of gum in the cubbyhole. Her fingers brushing against the tape recorder affixed to the top of it. The look of confusion on her face as she pulled it free, and then the fear, and then the rage.
“Are you”—she shook her head, disbelieving—“are you recording us?”
Cait’s mind raced. There must be something she could say, some excuse, some story . . . but there was nothing. Just a blank, howling silence and a roiling deep in her guts.
She watched, frozen, as Rebecca hit the rewind button on the recorder and then hit play. The two women’s voices filled the cabin. “Oh my God.” Rebecca dropped the recorder in her lap as if it were on fire. “You’ve been taping us this whole time.” She turned toward Cait, eyes wide and shining. “Why would you do that?”
“It’s not what you think.” Only that was a lie. It was exactly what she thought. “Look, Rebecca—”
“Who are you?”
She hated how scared the woman looked, and hated that it was her fault. “I’m Cait! I’m exactly who I said I was!”
“Let me out of this car right now.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere—”
“I don’t care!” Rebecca’s face was paper-pale. “I need you to pull over right now.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what’s safe,” Rebecca hissed. “Pull over.”
Cait steered the Jeep to the side of the road and cut the engine. “Look, Rebecca, let me explain—”
But the passenger door had already swung open, and Rebecca was already striding away from her across the desert, her blond hair silver in the moonlight.
Cait unclipped her seat belt but didn’t move to follow her. Her heart was pounding in her chest, her stomach churning. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the guilt kept coming, wave after sickening wave. She had fucked up. There was no getting away from that. Rebecca was right to hate her—she deserved her disgust. Her mother’s voice popped into her head. “Do good,” she would say as she waved her off to school in the morning. “Make yourself proud.”
Shame burned through her. Cait couldn’t remember the last time she’d made anyone proud, not least herself.
She glanced out the window and saw Rebecca’s silhouette pacing across the desert. There was no way to erase what had happened, but she could try to make up for it going forward. At the very least, she could get Rebecca out of the cold and back in the Jeep and see her safely to Albuquerque. She could do that much, surely. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
The only way she could do that was by coming clean.
Her footsteps rang out across the desert as she ran to catch Rebecca, who was standing still by then, arms wrapped tightly across her chest, shoulders shaking, either from the cold or from silent tears. She didn’t turn around when Cait reached out and touched her arm.
“Rebecca . . .” What came next? How could she explain herself to this woman whose life she’d set out to intentionally ruin? She took a deep breath. “I’m a writer.”
Rebecca’s head dropped an inch. “You said you were a bartender.”
Cait took a step forward. “That part was true. But I’m also a writer, and I was planning on writing a piece about you. About this,” she said, gesturing around vaguely.
“You were going to write about me. About this.” Rebecca’s voice was flat. Deadened. As if she’d expected something like this to happen. As if she wasn’t surprised at all.
Cait felt another stab of guilt. She struggled to find the words to explain herself. Suddenly, her whole carefully constructed reasoning seemed flimsy and pathetic. What was wrong with her? She had exploited the trust of a woman at her most vulnerable, betrayed the organization that had given her back a sense of purpose in life, and for what? Some misplaced revenge fantasy. Anyway, hadn’t this been all her fault, right from the beginning? Hadn’t she known what she was doing when she wrote that article? What did she think was going to happen when she went home with Jake that night, anyway? Maybe Patrick had been right to call her a coward. She’d been punishing other people for her own mistakes. Wasn’t that the very definition?
“I know who you are, and I know that you’re married to Patrick McRae.”
Rebecca let out a little mewl of pain. “What do you want? Money?”
“I don’t want money.”
“Are you even with that organization? Sisters of Service? Or was that a lie, too?”
“I’m with them.”
“They told me that it would be anonymous. They promised.” Rebecca’s shoulders shook harder, and Cait knew then that she was sobbing. “You’re going to ruin my life.”
Cait shook her head. “No, that’s not—I just thought—”
Rebecca laughed bitterly. “You know what? Go ahead. Write the damn article. It’s too late, anyway. My life is already fucked.”
“Rebecca, stop. I’m not going to write about you. I’m going to get you to Albuquerque and back to Lubbock like the Sisters said I would, and I swear to God I will never breathe a word of this to another soul. Okay?”
Rebecca was silent. In the moonlight, her hair was almost silver. Cait couldn’t take talking to the back of her head anymore, and she reached out and spun her around. Rebecca’s face was streaked with tears, and her eyes were pink and swollen. She looked . . . desolate. “What do you want from me?” she cried, her voice thickened with grief. “My baby is dying. Isn’t that enough for you? Why are you doing this?”
Cait ducked her head. “It’s not because of you. It’s because of your husband
.”
Rebecca’s lips were white and stretched tight across her teeth. “Oh, I figured that out already. A quick buck writing about the famous Patrick McRae’s wife having an abortion? I can see the headline now: ‘Politician’s Wife Murders Own Baby.’ I bet that would get you enough money to stop pouring drinks for a while, huh?” She shook her head and spat into the dirt. “You make me sick.”
Cait felt a surge of anger. That was the truth, wasn’t it? People like Cait had been making people like Rebecca sick for as long as there’d been stars in the sky. Okay, so she’d screwed up. Royally. Okay, so she’d intended on exploiting this woman, but hadn’t her husband done exactly that while this woman stood behind him, smiling that pretty smile of hers? Cait tightened her grip on Rebecca’s arm. “That speech he made, the one where he talked about Me Too and Jake Forsythe, the one that went viral? I was the one who wrote that article. After your husband said that about me, someone hacked into the website’s server and released my name. They found my home address, too, and they made it a point to terrorize me. I got death threats in the mail, people calling my phone at all hours, coming to my apartment . . . Every single day, I live in fear, and it’s your husband’s fault. I thought that you were just some hypocritical politician’s wife looking to sweep a scandal under the carpet. I didn’t know about your baby’s . . . condition. If I had known, I never would have planned it.” She took a breath. “So I’m sorry if I acted like an asshole, and I’m sorry that I recorded you without your knowing about it, and I’m sorry that I was going to write that article, but you have to understand that Patrick McRae ruined my life. You have to understand that.”
For a few moments, the only sounds were the distant cries of a bobcat and the two women’s thundering breath.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Rebecca said stiffly. “I’m sure Patrick didn’t do it intentionally.”
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