Chapter 23 Annie
ANNIE
I have to tell him.
I rehearse the conversation in my head until the words feel like pebbles I’ve been rolling in my mouth all morning—rounded, harmless, and still impossible to swallow.
There’s a voice inside me that says wait, make a plan, line up the contingencies, be the doctor and not the woman.
But another voice, smaller and steadier, says tell the truth while you still recognize it.
He’s a good man. He’s raised kids. He has held babies that were his and stayed. This isn’t outside his wheelhouse.
The thought is equal parts comfort and terror. Do I want him to stick around for this? For us?
In the deepest parts of my heart, I do. I want that. I want this, with him.
The fairgrounds feel too bright for what I’m carrying. Everything is loud and sun-slick. I cut through the lane behind the medic tent, where the light is thinner and cooler, like the breeze has decided to be merciful in narrow places.
I’m almost to the trailer rows when Mac steps out from behind a vendor cart and falls into my pace without asking.
She’s got her camera slung across her body, a coil of spare cables bouncing against her hip, and an iced coffee so sweaty it’s dripping down her wrist. “Dr. Pearl,” she says, too cheerful.
“Are you speed-walking to perform an emergency tonsillectomy?”
“Wrong department,” I say, but my smile feels stapled on. “Shouldn’t you be filming pre-show B-roll of kids spilling nacho cheese on their chaps?”
“Already got that. Twice.” She matches my stride like she trained for it. “What about you? You look like you’re about to run laps for your mental health.”
“Something like that.”
She narrows her eyes. “What’s going on? And don’t say nothing. You’re doing the thing with your mouth.”
“What thing?”
“The little half frown that says you swallowed a whole thought, and it went down sideways.”
I take a breath that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. “What’s up with you?”
“Look at you,” she says, bumping my shoulder. “Classic distraction technique. Fine, I’ll go first.” She makes a face that’s half-giddy, half-despairing. “I think I’m having trouble with my girl.”
It takes me a second to shift gears. “Trouble as in…?”
“As in, she was weirdly distant last night. Like she was distracted.” Mac pushes her hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist, then takes a sip through the straw.
“We hooked up, and it was good—like, so good I might have to recalibrate what good means—but then…she just went blank, almost. Not in a scary way. Just…far away. I don’t know.
Maybe it’s her way of not getting wrapped up in a fling. She did say it was no big deal.”
I make a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cough. My chest tightens with an irony heavy enough to bend steel. “Could be that,” I say carefully. “Or maybe she has something else on her mind. She’s riding well?”
Mac shrugs. “I think so? I haven’t been able to watch all her rides. I’m working, you know? And when I’m not, I’m trying not to act like a stalker. I like to think I’m classy.”
“You are not,” I say, automatic and fond. My heart keeps beating loud for a different reason. “Ask her.”
“What, like a girlfriend?” She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know. That sounds like relationship behavior. And this is just a hookup.”
“If it’s just a hookup,” I say, stepping around a coil of hose some volunteer left like a trap, “what are you so bent out of shape over?”
She huffs, then makes a face at herself. “Huh. I guess you’re right. It’s just—” Her mouth twists. “It’s different with girls usually. They like to talk. With guys, all you have to do is show up and say yes.”
“And?”
“With her, it’s like all I have to do is show up and say yes.” Mac’s cheeks color. She looks past my shoulder. “We don’t talk about much of anything. It’s just sex.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” I ask, which might be the most hypocritical line I’ve said this week.
“No. It’s perfect.”
We’ve reached the break in the trailers where the sun slices in a hard, narrow beam and every dust mote glows like it’s auditioning for a miracle. I stop and put my hands on her shoulders because she’s about to spiral into self-argument, and I don’t have the mental energy to play defense.
“Then what are you complaining about?” I say, looking her directly in the eyes. I mean it as a kindness. I mean it as a shove. Both can be true.
She opens her mouth to argue and finds nothing. The silence lands on her with a thump, and she smiles despite herself, small and abashed. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Good.” I give her shoulders a squeeze and step back into motion before I come apart. “I have to go check up on a patient.”
“Oh.” Her expression rearranges itself into an apology. “I’m sorry. You should have said something. Don’t let me stop you.”
“You’re not.” I try for a smile. “Say hi to your rider and ask how her day was. It won’t kill you.”
She makes a face. “That’s girlfriend stuff.”
“It’s human stuff. If she likes you enough to be handsy, you can treat her like a human being.”
She sighs. “Fine. I’ll…maybe. Go be a doctor. Try not to fix anyone too hard.”
“You first,” I say, and then, because I can’t stand the kindness in her eyes for one more second without telling her the truth that I’m not ready to let anyone hold, I turn down the lane and keep walking.
The trailers are their own neighborhood—door mats and folding chairs, a stray pair of boots outside a step, like someone decided to be polite to their own floor.
I know which one is his by muscle memory now.
My feet find it the way your hands find a light switch in a room you used to live in.
My palms are slick, but not from the heat.
Knock or walk in? I don’t know the rules for trailers. If I knock, I might change my mind. If I just go in, I might make a mess he can’t clean up without paper towels and a broom.
I knock. One. Two. I hear the small shifting sounds of a person who exists inside a tin box—chair legs, the whisper of a shirt sleeve, the thunk of a glass set down too carefully. Then his voice, rough with sleep or pain or both.
“Yeah.”
I open the door and step into air that smells like soap and leather and a sliver of antiseptic.
The blinds are half-closed against the heat, slats throwing stripes on the opposite wall.
He’s on the banquette, leaning back, ice pack on his shoulder.
His hat sits crown-down on the table. He looks up at me, and the line between his brows dissolves, then reforms when he reads my face.
“Doc. You okay?”
“No,” I say, because there’s no point lying. “Can I…?”
“Always,” he says, and then he seems to understand the scope of what always might mean. He shifts, more careful, and pats the space opposite him on the bench. “Sit.”
If I sit, I might never get up. I close the door behind me and keep my hand on the knob like I need it to stay vertical. Maybe I do. The trailer is small enough that we’re already close. I can count the fade lines on his shirt where the sun worked harder than the fabric.
My mouth is dry. My tongue feels like someone replaced it with a different kind of muscle. “I need to tell you something.”
A dozen expressions run through his face in as many heartbeats—humor, worry, care, that reflexive patience he keeps using like a shovel to dig both of us out. He nods once and sets the ice pack on the table. “Okay.”
“It’s…” I start, then start again, then decide to stop being the person who strings words out like beads because she thinks it will make them prettier.
“Over?” he rasps.
“I’m pregnant.”
He doesn’t move. Something in his eyes loosens and tightens at the same time. He was always going to be kind with whatever I handed him. I knew that the way I know my own name. The kindness doesn’t make the silence easier. It makes it heavier.
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks down at his hands like he’s checking to make sure they’re attached. Thumbs together, then apart. When he looks up again, there’s a question in his face I didn’t prepare for. “How far,” he says, and clears his throat. “How far along?”
“I don’t know.” Honesty has momentum. I can’t stop it now. “Early. We haven’t been together long. I ran a serum test at the clinic. It was positive. I haven’t…I haven’t done anything else yet.”
He nods once, slow, like a man trying to memorize a pattern. “Okay.” The word lands after the pause like a promise he doesn’t know how to keep yet. There’s a long moment of quiet. Then, softly, quietly—so quietly I almost miss the first syllable. “Annie, you deserve better than me.”
It’s not the sentence I prepared for. My brain stalls out, and my mouth makes a tiny, ridiculous sound, the kind you make when you step off a curb you didn’t see. “What?”
He holds my gaze like he’s forcing himself to. “Go find it.” He nods toward the door.
My body does that stupid thing it does when something lands too close to the bone. It freezes and melts at the same time. Something fractures in my chest. I hear the words, and they feel like a hand on my shoulder that means to steer me and then squeezes too hard.
He’s not insulting me. He’s not abandoning me. He’s not telling me to handle this alone.
But he’s telling me I’m alone in this all the same.
I open my mouth and realize I didn’t think past this point. My rehearsals didn’t cover this. Get the hell out of here, I was prepared for. We’ll be together forever, was also on the list.
But this? No. Not at all.
I want to say it’s not about what either of us deserves. I want to say I don’t know what I want beyond today. I want to say I came here because I wanted him to hold the knowledge with me, not because I needed him to fix it.
I want to say I’m scared out of my mind, and I thought his voice would make my hands stop shaking. But nothing comes out.
I nod. The tiny pivot of my chin feels like a boulder rolling downhill. The die is cast, the anchor was pulled up, the wheels are in motion.
I turn because if I stay, I will touch him, and if I touch him, I will ask for something I cannot name and do not deserve.
The door is heavier than it was when I came in.
I open it into light that stabs, and I step down onto the hot metal steps with the exaggerated caution of a person learning how to walk on a moving train.
My eyes burn. My mouth hurts from gritting my teeth against every curse word I know.
I make it to the bottom and get two steps onto gravel before the tears hit.