Chapter 1
The waiting room at Silver Creek Fertility Clinic smelled like lavender air freshener and disinfectant, a combination Hawk had come to hate over the past two years.
He sat in the corner chair, the one farthest from the door, his leather cut folded over his knee because Dr. Sloan's receptionist had once given him a look when he wore it inside.
Big man, tattooed knuckles, a patch on his back that said PRESIDENT in bold white stitching — he didn't belong in a room with pastel paintings of lilacs and pamphlets about ovulation cycles.
He knew that. He came anyway. For Emma, he'd have sat in a room full of nuns reciting scripture at him.
Today, though, Emma wasn't beside him.
She'd wanted to come. She always wanted to come. But her sister had gone into early labor two towns over, and Emma had kissed him at the door that morning, her hand lingering against his jaw, and said, "Call me the second you know something. I mean it, Hawk. The second."
"I will," he'd told her, and he'd meant it.
He glanced at his phone now. 10:47 AM. The appointment had been for 10:30. He'd give it ten more minutes before he started pacing, and if he started pacing, the receptionist would probably ask him to step outside.
"Mr. Lawson?"
The nurse who called his name was young, dark-haired, professionally pleasant in the way people got when they'd delivered a thousand different kinds of news and had to keep their face neutral for the next one. Hawk stood, and his boots felt heavier than usual crossing the tile floor.
Dr. Sloan's office was at the end of the hall, a corner room with a window that looked out over the clinic's parking lot.
Hawk had been in this office four times before — after the first round of tests, after the second, after the specialist referral, after the "let's try a few lifestyle adjustments and see" conversation that had felt, even then, like a stall tactic.
Every time, Dr. Sloan had greeted him with the same tight, professional smile.
He wore it now too, but something about it sat wrong on his face, a little too careful, like a man walking on ice he wasn't sure would hold.
"Hunter. Please, sit."
Hawk didn't like being called Hunter. Only his mother had called him that, and she'd been gone twelve years. But he let it go, the way he always did with doctors, because doctors held information he needed and irritation wouldn't get him answers any faster.
He sat.
"Is Emma with you today?" Sloan asked, glancing toward the door as though she might materialize.
"Her sister's having a baby. She sends her love. Just tell me what you got, Doc." Hawk's knee was already bouncing. He pressed his palm flat against it to stop.
Dr. Sloan opened the folder in front of him.
Hawk watched his eyes move across the page, watched the small crease form between his brows, watched him take in a breath before he spoke — and Hawk knew, in the pit of his stomach, before a single word left the man's mouth, that whatever was coming wasn't good.
"I want to start by saying I'm sorry," Sloan said.
Hawk's jaw tightened. "Just say it."
"The results from your semen analysis came back significantly abnormal.
We're looking at severe oligospermia — bordering on azoospermia, which means an extremely low, functionally negligible sperm count.
Combined with the motility and morphology numbers here—" he turned the folder slightly, as if Hawk could read the columns of numbers and understand them the way he could "—I have to tell you, Hunter, that natural conception isn't realistic.
Even with intervention, the odds are vanishingly small.
I don't say this lightly. In my professional opinion, you will not be able to father a biological child. "
The room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with sound.
Hawk heard the air conditioning hum. He heard a car door slam in the parking lot outside. He heard his own pulse, thick and slow, in his ears. But the words themselves didn't seem to land anywhere real. They floated somewhere just outside his skull, close enough to recognize, too heavy to let in.
"That's not possible," Hawk said. His voice came out lower than he meant it to.
"I understand this is difficult—"
"No." Hawk shook his head, once, sharp. "You said the numbers were low last time.
Low. Not this. You said with time, with the vitamins, with cutting back on—" he gestured vaguely, as if the words could conjure the months of protein powders and cold showers and giving up the whiskey he used to have most nights, all because some pamphlet said heat and alcohol killed sperm count. "I did everything you told me to do."
"And I wish I could tell you it made a difference.
Sometimes these conditions are simply not responsive to lifestyle changes.
This can be genetic, structural—there are a number of possible causes, and honestly, further testing could help identify which, but the outcome, functionally, remains the same.
" Sloan folded his hands on the desk. "I know this isn't what you wanted to hear. "
Hawk stared at the folder. At the numbers he couldn't read, that some part of him wanted to grab and shred anyway, as if destroying the paper might undo what it said.
"So I'm..." He couldn't make himself say the word. It sat in his throat like a stone.
"Sterile," Sloan said quietly, filling in the silence Hawk had left. "Yes. I'm sorry."
Hawk had been shot at twice in his life.
He'd taken a bat to the ribs in a bar fight in Reno that put him in the hospital for four days.
He'd buried his father, and six years later, his mother, and he'd stood at both gravesides without shedding a single tear because that wasn't what the man in front of a hundred watching brothers was allowed to do.
But sitting in that office chair, hearing a man in a white coat tell him — calmly, professionally, like he was reading off a weather report — that he would never give Emma a child, something in Hawk's chest cracked clean in half.
He didn't remember standing up. He didn't remember thanking the doctor, though some numb, functioning part of him must have, because he found himself in the hallway a minute later, staring at a watercolor painting of tulips bolted to the wall, his hand pressed flat against the wall beside it like he needed it to hold him up.
He didn't call Emma.
He got on his bike and rode until the anger and grief blurred together into something he couldn't separate anymore, until his hands ached from gripping the throttle too hard, until the sun started dipping low and orange over the ridge outside town and he realized he'd been riding for almost three hours without a destination.
◆◆◆
Emma was home when he finally walked through the door. She'd beaten him back from her sister's — mother and baby both fine, a girl, seven pounds two ounces — and she'd been sitting on the porch swing with her phone in her lap for the last hour, watching the road.
"Hawk." She was up before he'd even closed the gate, crossing the yard in her socked feet. "I texted you like ten times. What happened? Did you talk to Dr. Sloan? What did he say?"
He stopped in the middle of the yard. In the fading light, she looked so hopeful it hurt to look at her — the kind of hope that came from five years of trying and failing and trying again, the kind of hope she'd protected fiercely even when he'd started to lose his.
"Hawk," she said again, softer now, reading something in his face. "Talk to me."
"I can't have kids." The words came out flatter than he meant them, stripped down to their ugliest, plainest form because he didn't trust himself to say them any other way.
"Sterile. That's what he said. Practically no—" He stopped, shook his head, looked away from her toward the tree line.
"It's not happening, Em. It was never going to happen. Not with me."
Emma's hand came up to her mouth. For a moment, she just stood there, absorbing it, and then she closed the distance between them and wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing her face into his chest like she could hold the pain out of him through sheer will.
"Okay," she whispered. "Okay. We'll figure it out. There are other ways, Hawk — adoption, or IVF with a donor, if that's something you'd even consider, or—" she pulled back to look up at him "—or nothing. We don't need any of it. I married you. Not a baby. You know that, right?"
He wanted to believe her. He wanted to let her words settle into the wound and soothe it the way she meant them to.
But something ugly had already taken root in him, some old, stupid, inherited idea about what made a man a man, and it whispered that he'd failed her.
That he was broken in the one way that couldn't be fixed with a wrench or a fist or sheer stubbornness.
That somewhere down the line, she'd resent him for it, even if she never said so.
"Yeah," he said, because it was easier than arguing with her kindness. "I know."
She held his face in both hands, searching his eyes. "Hey. Look at me. This doesn't change anything between us. I love you. That's not conditional on some lab report."
"I hear you." He kissed her forehead, but even that felt distant, like he was performing the motion of comfort rather than feeling it. "I just need some time, Em. I need to sit with it."
She let him go, reluctantly, watching him walk past her into the house, his boots heavy on the porch steps.
She stood alone in the yard a moment longer, arms wrapped around herself against the evening chill, and told herself it would be okay.
That grief had its own timeline. That Hawk had never been a man who processed pain out loud — she'd known that when she married him — and he'd come back to her when he was ready.