Chapter 1
Ellie Parks had been living in fear of the midnight phone call since high school. Ever since Melanie had first started running around with Ty Porter and had begun her walk off the good girl path and into destruction.
She’d been waiting to hear the worst.
And while this wasn’t the worst, it was shocking in a way that left her cold.
She grabbed her purse off her nightstand, along with her phone, which was never in do-not-disturb mode, all because of her sister.
Then she walked downstairs, and toward the front door.
And heard the sound of her roommate’s door opening.
To be accurate, Ellie was Angelica’s roommate, rather than the other way around.
It was Angelica’s house, and Ellie helped pay the mortgage by renting a room.
It wasn’t impossible to buy a house on a teacher’s salary, but it was difficult.
And while Ellie was saving up for a down payment, her colleague had been generous enough to let her stay.
It was a little bit weird living with her former teacher. But then, Angelica was now a coworker at the high school Ellie had once attended.
It had taken her a while to start calling her colleagues by their first names.
She had taught at a private school for a while, about forty-five minutes away, and then had taught at a high school in Portland before coming back to Caldwell, all the way in the desolate eastern part of the state of Oregon, where she’d decided to take a job as an English teacher at her alma mater.
Coming back to town had been …
Well, it was loaded. And not just because of her sister.
“Is everything all right?”
Angelica was at the top of the stairs, holding her bathrobe closed.
If she had been told in ninth grade that she would one day see her biology teacher in a bathrobe, she would’ve died.
“Not really. Melanie.” She couldn’t even bring herself to say it out loud.
But she didn’t want Angelica to think Melanie was dead.
Which was, of course, the first thing she had thought when she’d seen an unfamiliar number on the phone coming through at this late hour.
“I’ve got to go to the hospital. She … she had a baby. ”
“Oh, honey. Do you need somebody to go with you?”
“No. I just have to …” She closed her eyes. “I have to go.”
She walked out the front door to the curb where she’d parked her little sedan. She got inside and took a deep breath as she gripped the steering wheel. She didn’t know what she was going to do. At least the school year had ended last week. A bubble of laughter escaped her lips. Hysteria, really.
But she still had no idea what she was going to do, and the words of the social worker who had called her were echoing in her head.
Temporary placement. Emergency care.
A baby girl.
The hospital was fifteen minutes away, and she was just barely holding it together.
What if this had happened somewhere else?
Melanie and Ty weren’t always in town. Ellie was a little surprised she hadn’t known Melanie was pregnant.
Of course, her parents wouldn’t know. They’d given up on Melanie a long time ago.
There was a reason the hospital had contacted Ellie.
She could freak out later. She needed to get there. She needed to figure out exactly what was going on. She needed …
She would cry later. Later, Ellie was going to sob her heart out.
But not now. She just needed to get through the next couple of hours.
She pulled up to the maternity ward at the hospital and parked before heading into the facility.
She paused at the front desk.
“Who are you here to see?”
She did not answer that question. Melanie Parks wasn’t the person who’d called her. She was here to see the baby. She was here to see a social worker. Someone from Child Protective Services.
“I got a call from CPS,” she said.
“Oh,” the woman said. “You can just put CPS.”
“Thank you,” she said, her throat tight.
She leaned in and put her name, then CPS, followed by the date and time on the sign-in sheet. And was given a name tag and sent inside.
“You can come into the room,” a nurse said, looking down at her name tag.
“I …” She hadn’t seen Melanie for a year. And she was scared. She didn’t know how bad her sister would look. How much difference the ravages of drugs would’ve made in the time since she’d last seen her.
When she walked into the hospital room, the curtain was shut.
“Visitor,” the nurse said.
The curtain swept open, and her heart jumped. But her sister wasn’t there. Neither was her sister’s longtime boyfriend, Ty Porter, whom Melanie blamed for absolutely everything. Instead, she found herself staring at the tall, broad frame of a cowboy, his back to her, cradling a baby.
He didn’t even have to turn around for her to know who it was.
Clark Porter.
“I …”
He turned around, and her heart leapt up into the center of her throat. Goddamn Clark Porter. She should hate the Porters. Really, she did.
But Clark had always been a tall, disastrous drink of whiskey that she knew she couldn’t afford to take.
He had gotten here before her.
It was an echo of about a hundred other moments in their lives. Whether it was a rent-by-the-hour motel parking lot. An ER. The parking lot of a Wendy’s. All those times they’d responded to SOS calls from their siblings and shown up ready to do battle for them.
And often with each other.
Clark was someone she saw much more often than she wanted to. It was always a crisis. And when she saw him, her body went into fight-or-flight response—her stomach going tight, her heart beating hard and heavy.
Fitting this time, because this was inarguably a crisis.
“What are you doing here?”
“Ty called me,” he said, his voice rough.
“Child services called me,” she said, and she felt her tone sounded petulant, more wounded than she intended it to.
“We should both take that meeting,” he said.
She shook her head, not understanding fully. “Why?”
“They’re looking for family to take her.”
“Yes, and I assume they were going to ask me.”
She felt strangled by the circumstances. She didn’t think she was in a place to take care of a baby, but she wasn’t a homeless drug addict, so she was definitely a more stable option than her sister.
“They signed over their rights,” Clark said.
“They did?”
The wave of grief was fresh and overwhelming.
Melanie had a baby. Melanie wasn’t even going to try to raise the baby. In many ways, it was a shocking, definitive act of love on her sister’s part, but Ellie couldn’t help feeling broken by it. That her sister was choosing drugs over her baby.
It isn’t that simple. You know it’s not. She isn’t going to bring this child into that chaotic ocean of her life and let her drown along with them.
“The social worker can speak to you both, if you like,” the nurse said.
“Yeah,” Clark said, nodding.
Ellie was transfixed then by the little bundle in his arms. Tiny and pink, scrunched up in that tightly wrapped blanket. She had a little cap on her head, and she was just … perfect.
“Has there been … medically …”
“She’s good,” Clark said.
They were now standing there alone in the room. She could clearly remember the last time she’d seen Clark. She’d been horrible, actually, and she felt bad about it, but not bad enough to apologize. Not even now, a year later.
Yeah, it had been about a year.
A year since she’d seen Clark, and Ty, and Melanie. They’d been in a motel parking lot, Ty and Melanie having a huge fight, the motel owner threatening to call the police.
Just come with me, Mel.
I can’t!
Of course she couldn’t, because Ellie wouldn’t enable her drug use. Of course she couldn’t, because even when they were monsters to each other, she and Ty were in the kind of toxic love written about in bad teen romances.
When Ty and Melanie had driven off and left her there with the angry motel owner and Clark, she’d lost it at him.
He’d paid the motel bill.
That still bothered her. They should have split it.
“She doesn’t have … They don’t think she has any issues from … You know that Melanie had to have been on drugs.”
Ellie was almost positive Melanie hadn’t been sober for more than thirty days in the last ten years. She hadn’t kept in close contact with her sister, but if Melanie had managed any extended sobriety, she would have told Ellie.
“The baby’s perfectly healthy. I’m sure there are things that might come up later, things they can’t look for now, but she doesn’t have any obvious problems.”
The relief she felt was extreme. “Thank God. Did you know?”
He shook his head. “No. I didn’t know. Ty called me right after she was born. Said there was no way they could look after her, and that he needed me to come and get her.”
“I must be on some form that Melanie filled out,” she said. She didn’t have a way of getting in touch with her sister. Melanie was more likely to have a burner phone than anything else.
“I’ll take her,” she said.
“You’re not just going to take her, Ellie. She’s my niece, just the same as yours. And I want to take care of her.”
“Clark,” she said, his name coming out of her mouth in a rush, tasting strange on her tongue. Of all the weird things about this moment, she didn’t need to go getting tangled up about Clark. “Your lifestyle is not conducive to raising a baby.”
“I’m retired from the rodeo. Didn’t you know?”
“Oh. I guess you must’ve taken me off your Christmas card list.”
“Funny. I just figured, in a small town, news travels quickly. I knew that you were back teaching at the high school.”
“Probably because my mom was bragging about it.”
She knew that, in general, her mother wasn’t completely happy with her decision to become a teacher. But considering her other child was a homeless drug addict, Nancy Parks was going to be bragging about that teaching job.
“Could be. And you know my mom wasn’t bragging about me.”
Because his mom was face down in a pool of her own problems, her own addictions, and probably not paying attention to the one functional child she had.