Page 54
Jagger
Ican't move.
The wind's cutting hard enough across the yard to sting, whipping my face. I watch Lainey get smaller and smaller as she runs toward the guesthouses and past the second cattle guard.
My boots might as well be nailed to the ground. I stay planted in the frozen grass, my arms hanging useless at my sides. Every practical bone in my body is screaming at me to move, to chase her down before she gets that door shut between us. But I can't make a single muscle cooperate. And three statements replay on a loop that's already worn a groove straight through my skull.
A doctor's office.
Four months later.
A decision I made in one single reckless night.
Every time they loop, my chest gets tighter, colder, like somebody's slowly cinching a rope around my ribs and I can't figure out which direction to pull to loosen it.
What in God's name was she talking about?
Every possibility I can think of arises. My mind cycles through each one methodically because it's easier than sitting with the panic climbing up my throat.
Not an STD.
I've been tested twice since New Year's, and both times, I was negative for everything. The results sit in my inbox that I still have saved because some superstitious part of me wanted proof on hand.
And even setting my own results aside, I know Lainey. Knew her, anyway, for one long night that's apparently defined the better part of a year for both of us. She's not a woman who'd sit on news like that for eleven months. She'd have called a clinic the second she suspected anything, handled it head-on the same brisk, capable way she handles everything else. She wouldn't have shown up eleven months later working my family's horses like nothing ever happened between us.
Not an injury.
She's standing here, moving fine, running faster than I've ever seen a woman run in boots across frozen ground. Plus, what would that have had to do with me?
Not cancer.
Not some rare disease.
Not anything ordinary or explainable that would account for a doctor's office at four months after our encounter and a decision she described as reshaping an entire life around, alone, three hours from wherever I was busy failing to find her.
She must be confused.
Something's happened, and she's blaming me. There's nothing—
The realization lands in my gut, slow and then all at once. It's a punch more furious than if someone hit me for real.
She's talking about a baby.
My baby.
Goose bumps race up both my arms so fast, it feels like the temperature just dropped another twenty degrees. They prickle straight through my jacket, down my spine, across the back of my neck where my hair's standing on end despite the hat still pulled low over my ears. My heart isn't just pounding anymore. It's slamming a fist against a locked door, hard enough that I can feel it in my throat, my wrists, and in the roof of my mouth.
I have a kid?
I have a kid, and I'm standing in a frozen pasture finding out about it secondhand through a sentence she didn't even mean to say?
A sentence she looked horrified the second it left her mouth, like she'd have taken a bullet before she let that particular truth slip.
What the fuck!
My knees actually wobble. I catch myself against the fence post, gripping cold wood hard enough that a splinter bites into my palm. And I barely register the sting of it. I'm too busy trying to force air back into lungs that have apparently forgotten how they work.
Eleven months.
