Chapter 39
Dual POV
The wooden latch on the storm screen clicked open with a dull, hollow snap.
Tallulah took two steps back into the dry hallway of the cottage, her cream cardigan wrapped tightly around her waist, her face an unyielding mask of pale stone.
"Get inside the house, Coast," she said.
Her voice dropped between us like cold lead, stripped of pity, stripped of warmth. "Before you die on my mother's porch."
I tried to push up from the bottom riser, but the quadriceps in my thighs seized in violent, spastic cramps. My trousers were waterlogged, soaked through with ninety minutes of highway slush; my hands were blue-white around the knuckles, the skin numb past the wrists.
I hauled myself up the three cedar steps by digging my fingers into the railing, my waterlogged boots leaving gray, salty puddles across the threshold.
The heat from the cast-iron woodstove hit my chest like a physical blow.
Steam began rising instantly from the soaked fibers of my black thermal shirt, smelling of wet road grit and bitter sweat. The smell of the house wrapped around my throat—peppermint leaves, dried cedar, and the clean almond scent of her skin.
I didn't step onto the clean hardwood. I didn't look at the furniture.
My knees gave out three feet inside the room.
I collapsed straight down onto the braided wool rug in front of the hearth, my wet boots sliding behind me, my massive frame sinking into the floorboards. I sat on my calves, my head bowed so low my chin rested against the damp collar of my shirt, my hands resting open and useless on my thighs.
A violent, continuous shudder racked my shoulders, my back teeth clicking together in rapid, uncontrollable tremors as the indoor heat fought the sub-zero frost deep in my bone marrow.
I stared at the woven blue wool between my knees.
I didn't have the right to look at her. I didn't have the right to breathe the air in this room.
I watched the hem of her thick cream cardigan move across the edge of my vision, her wool-socked feet making no sound on the pine planks as she walked toward the kitchen counter.
Every second that stretched between us was an executioner's blade hovering over my neck. I was terrified that if I blinked, if I raised my head, the door would fly open and I would find myself back on the concrete runner in Lake Placid, clutching a crushed fistful of paper.
* * *
The ceramic mug was hot against my palms as I set it down on the floorboards six inches from his soaked boots.
Beside it, I dropped a thick, folded navy bath towel.
Coast didn't reach for the towel. He didn't reach for the tea.
He stayed on his knees on the braided rug, his six-foot-four frame hunched forward like a broken monument, his broad shoulders heaving in shallow, spastic shudders.
The steam curling off his soaked thermal was thick, carrying the smell of exhaust and melting highway ice.
A puddle of gray water was spreading slowly across the pine planks from the cuffs of his trousers.
I stood three feet away, my arms folded across my ribs, my right hand anchored firmly beneath the thick knit of my cardigan, resting flat over my lower abdomen.
My heart was pounding with a slow, heavy rhythm that made my collarbones ache.
"You think this fixes it, Coast?" I asked.
My voice was quiet, steady as the winter shale outside, but each word cut through the hiss of the woodstove like an iron wedge.
Coast’s head didn't rise. A drop of melting sleet fell from his dark eyelashes, hitting the back of his bruised hand.
"You think driving sixty-four miles in a blizzard and falling on your knees fixes what you said in that underpass?
" I continued, looking down at his bowed skull.
"You think destroying your own draft standing proves you love me?
Self-destruction isn't an apology, Coast. It's just another way for you to stay in control of the bleeding. "
A low, ruined sound tore from his throat, his hands curling into fists against his wet denim.
"I know," he choked out, the words scraping through his cracked vocal cords.
I turned away from him, walking to the small cedar writing desk beside the bay window.
I pulled open the drawer.
Inside lay the blue flannel handkerchief I had carried from Lake Placid. I picked it up, untied the knot with steady fingers, and took out the two white plastic wands.
I walked back to the hearth.
I didn't throw them. I bent down, placing both tests flat on the low pine coffee table right beside his bowed forehead, directly beneath the amber light of the reading lamp.
The digital screen was stark and black:
PREGNANT / 2-3 WEEKS
Beside it, the two crimson stripes on the rapid-response strip burned dark and permanent against the white membrane.
Coast’s eyes flicked to the table.
For three seconds, nothing happened.
Then the violent shivering in his broad shoulders stopped.
Dead. Absolute.
The room seemed to lose its gravity. The crackle of the woodstove vanished; the howling wind outside the hemlocks died into a ringing, suffocating silence.
Coast’s head came up slowly, inch by inch, as if lifting a hundred pounds of dead iron.
His bloodshot green eyes landed on the digital display.
He stared at the black pixels. Then his gaze dropped to the two crimson lines.
The breath seized in his windpipe with a sharp, strangling sound. The pupils of his eyes dilated until the green irises vanished into black voids, his mouth falling slightly open, his jaw slack with an absolute, paralyzing shock that drained the last speck of color from his stubbled face.
"I took those at six o'clock on Saturday morning," I whispered into the silence, my hand pressing hard against my stomach, feeling the dragging, living warmth beneath my palm.
Coast didn't move. He looked like a man who had stepped onto surface ice and watched it shatter beneath his feet.
"I wrapped them in that cloth," I said, a single tear breaking from my lash to track hot and silent down my cheek. "I put them in my coat pocket, right over my heart. And I ran six blocks through the slush to the arena tunnel."
A single, scalding tear broke from Coast’s left eye, cutting a clean, pale line through the dried road dirt and dried blood on his cheekbone.
"I went down those stairs to tell you that you were going to be a father, Coast," I wept, the words trembling with the raw, jagged agony of that concrete hallway.
"I went down there to tell you that Arthur was blackmailing us, but we were going to protect our family together.
And you looked at me like I was dirt beneath your skates.
You told me I was a calculating parasite.
You told me I was the biggest mistake of your life. "
* * *
The world inside my skull detonated.
The word father hit my breastbone like an armor-piercing round, tearing through muscle, through bone, through the four years of guilt and rage, blowing my entire existence into smoking, shredded ribbons.
A baby.
My child.
Living, breathing, growing beneath the soft cream wool of her sweater.
Conceived in the dark of my bedroom while the gale shook the timbers. Conceived when I held her hands to the mattress and swore she was mine forever.
And I had screamed at her.
I had ripped her bag from her shoulder. I had left her kneeling in a puddle of dirty water beneath an arena underpass while she carried my flesh and blood in her womb.
The horror of it caved my ribs inward with a concussive, suffocating weight that knocked the air clean out of my lungs.
Whatever pride was left in my soul, whatever athletic arrogance I had carried across the blue line, turned to dust on the floorboards.
I didn't stand up.
I dropped my hands to the braided rug, dragging my 228-pound frame forward on my knees across the wood until my chest pressed flat against her shins.
My hands rose from the floor.
My large, calloused, scarred fingers were shaking with a terrifying, reverent fragility, looking brutal and filthy against the cream knit of her cardigan.
I slid my palms beneath the heavy wool, past the hem of her gray thermal, flattening my bare, rough hands over the soft, rounded warmth of her lower abdomen.
The heat of her skin hit my palms like a brand.
A child. Our child.
My forehead dropped forward, pressing hard against the denim of her knees.
The dam inside my chest broke.
A dry, ragged, animal sob tore from my throat—a sound so ruined and shattered it vibrated through the floorboards into the foundation stones.
I wept.
I wept like a man dying on a frozen lake, my broad shoulders heaving in violent, spastic surges, hot tears soaking straight through the denim of her trousers against her skin.
My hands stayed glued to her stomach, my thumbs smoothing over her abdomen with an agonizing, desperate tenderness that begged for mercy I didn't deserve.
"I'm sorry," I sobbed into her knees, my voice cracked, broken, bleeding out on the rug. "Tallulah... sweetheart... I'm so sorry. Oh God, I'm so sorry."
I leaned up on my knees, pressing my open mouth to the soft cotton covering her belly, kissing the life beneath her skin with ragged, desperate reverence.
"I'll crawl to Boston," I wept against her womb, my fingers splaying wide over her hips, anchoring myself to her body like a drowning man clutching a rock in the rapids.
"I'll spend every second of my life bleeding for you both.
I'll give you every dime, I'll take every hit, I'll tear the world down before anyone touches you.
Just don't shut me out, Tallulah. Please. Don't take my family away from me."
The room was filled with the sound of my ragged gasps and the steady crackle of the woodstove.
I stayed there at her feet, broken wide open, my face buried in the fabric of her cardigan, waiting for her to push me away into the snow.
Then her hand moved.
Slowly, hesitating for two agonizing heartbeats, her small, warm fingers slid beneath my jaw.
Her touch was gentle. Her fingers rose, sinking into the dark, wet curls at the nape of my neck, her palm cradling the back of my skull, drawing my head tight against the warmth of her stomach.
A single, hot drop of moisture fell from her chin, splashing against my temple.
The fortress had cracked. The iron had held.
And kneeling in the dirt on her mother's rug, holding the woman I loved and the child she carried, I knew the reckoning was finally over.