Chapter 39
Dual POV
"Get inside before you freeze to death on my porch, Guzman."
Her voice was flat, quiet, and carried the steady, unyielding sharpness of an iron rail.
I didn't answer. I couldn't force air past the constriction in my windpipe.
I dragged my weight off the icy porch boards, my knees screaming as my boots stumbled over the wooden threshold. My legs felt like unmoored timber, numb and uncoordinated, tracking gray slush across the scrubbed pine floorboards of her cottage.
The heavy solid-oak door shut behind my back, the brass deadbolt clicking into place with a hollow, pressurized thud that sealed out the howling blizzard.
The cottage was small, smelling of dried cedar, peppermint, burning birch logs, and the intoxicating, clean warmth of her skin. In the corner, the cast-iron woodstove glowed dull orange, throwing dry heat into the room.
I didn't step onto her rugs with my soaked clothes.
My fingers were swollen, blue with frostbite, fumbling clumsily at the horn buttons of my black wool peacoat. I stripped the heavy, sodden jacket off my shoulders, letting forty pounds of freezing wet wool drop to the rubber mat by the door.
I staggered three steps forward and dropped straight to my knees on the braided wool rug in front of the hearth.
The heat from the iron stove hit my face like a furnace.
My body convulsed in violent, uncontrollable tremors. My jaw rattled, my teeth clicking together so hard the roots ached, my chest spasming as the freezing blood in my extremities fought the sudden warmth of the room.
I bowed my head.
I didn't dare look up at her walls. I didn't dare look at the pine table or the small bay window facing the lake. I felt like toxic waste dragged into a clean room, a violent, broken beast who had no right to breathe the air inside her sanctuary.
I kept my hands flat on my thighs, staring down at the braided loops of wool between my knees, watching the hem of her thick cream-colored cardigan move silently across the floorboards.
* * *
He was shaking so violently the cast-iron latch on the woodstove rattled in its housing.
I stood by the small kitchen counter, watching the broad, ruined expanse of his back.
Steam was rising off his damp black henley in thin, ghostly wisps, the fabric clinging to the bruised shelf of his shoulders.
His dark hair was dripping melted road slush onto the braided rug, his jaw clenched tight against the shuddering spasms of his chest.
My throat pulled tight, an agonizing, hot ache tightening beneath my collarbone, but I forced my spine to remain straight.
I picked up a folded gray bath towel and a steaming ceramic mug of hot water and honey from the counter.
I walked across the room, stopping two paces from where he knelt.
I set the towel and the mug on the floorboards beside his right knee without making a sound.
"Drink it," I said, my voice steady, sharp, and cold as the frost outside.
Chase didn't touch the mug. He didn't lift his head from the floorboards.
"Nola," he rasped, the word a broken, bleeding whisper that dragged against his vocal cords.
"Why are you here, Chase?"
He bowed his head lower, his hands gripping his wet sweatpants until his knuckles were white. "I came to atone. I came to tell you that Ross is in jail. That your name is clean."
"You think having Ross arrested fixes what you said in that tunnel?"
My voice didn't rise, but each syllable cut through the quiet room with surgical, merciless precision.
"You think dragging yourself through the snow and handing Miller an excuse to strip your draft standing makes you a martyr?" I stepped closer, my shadow falling over his bowed shoulders. "You called me a parasite, Chase. You looked me in the eyes and told me I was the biggest mistake of your life."
"I know," he choked out, a ragged, dry sob tearing through his ribs, his shoulders heaving. "I know what I am. I was terrified. I saw my father’s face, and I burned the only good thing I ever had."
"You weren't terrified of your father," I whispered, my fingers slipping into the deep pocket of my wool cardigan. "You were terrified of being loved."
My hand emerged from the pocket.
In my fingers, I held the clean white linen handkerchief.
Slowly, with hands that did not tremble, I unfolded the cotton corners, laying the contents bare beneath the warm orange light of the fire.
The white plastic test with two thick, dark pink lines.
And beneath it, the official printed lab slip from the Marquette community health clinic, stamped yesterday afternoon at two o'clock.
I took two steps forward, bent down, and set the test and the clinic confirmation flat on the pine coffee table, directly in front of his bowed face.
"I didn't run down that tunnel to ask about my grant, Chase," I whispered, my voice finally cracking on the words, the tears burning hot and sharp behind my lower lids.
Chase stayed frozen, his eyes locked on the floorboards.
"I ran three miles through a blinding blizzard forty minutes before puck drop because I wanted to look you in the face before you stepped on that ice," I said, my hand dropping down to press flat, warm, and protective over the lower curve of my abdomen.
"I came to tell you that you were going to be a father. "
The room plunged into an absolute, suffocating void.
Chase went rigid as stone.
The violent shivering in his shoulders stopped dead.
His breath locked in his throat, a sharp, choked gasp catching in his windpipe.
Slowly, dragging his chin upward as if his skull weighed an ocean, his bloodshot, ruined eyes rose from the floorboards to the pine table.
His gaze hit the two pink lines.
His eyes widened in a look of such blinding, catastrophic shock that every drop of blood drained from his face, leaving his skin the color of ash.
A single, hot tear broke from his lash line, carving a clean, shining line through the soot and road grime on his cheekbone.
* * *
My sternum shattered inward.
The two pink bars on the plastic casing burned through my optic nerves like white phosphorus, searing straight down into the marrow of my bones.
A father.
The syllable hit my ribs with the force of an avalanche, tearing away the last surviving wall of my skull.
My child.
My flesh, my blood, growing inside the woman I had shoved into the cinder-block wall of an arena basement.
The horror of what I had done—the sheer, sickening magnitude of what I had almost ground into the dirt to protect my own cowardly pride—tore through my chest with concussive, devastating violence.
I didn't stand. I didn't think.
I moved on my knees.
I crawled across the braided rug, dragging my weight through the dirt until my thighs hit her bare feet.
My hands rose.
My massive, calloused hands—the hands that had held composite sticks, the hands that had split knuckles against visors, the hands that had almost destroyed my own world—trembled with an agonizing, terrifying reverence.
Slowly, holding my breath as if she were made of spun sugar, my flat palms settled over the thick knit of her cream cardigan.
Right over the lower curve of her abdomen.
The heat beneath the wool struck my palms like sunlight breaking over frozen water.
A savage, shattered sob ripped out of my throat—a raw, broken howl that tore through my vocal cords, emptying my lungs completely.
I bent my spine, pressing my forehead flat against her knees, my hands splaying wide across the front of her sweater, holding her belly against my face as heavy, wracking sobs tore through my frame.
My tears soaked straight through the knit fabric, scalding the skin beneath.
"I'm sorry," I wept, the words choking out in jagged, bloody fragments against her legs. "I'm so sorry, Nola... please... God, please... our baby... our baby..."
I pressed my mouth to the soft wool over her stomach, kissing the swell of her abdomen through the fabric, my lips trembling with broken, desperate oaths.
"I will spend every breath of my life on these boards," I cried, my fingers digging gently into the knit of her sweater, anchoring myself to her warmth like a drowning man clutching the shore.
"I will crawl from here to the Pacific. I will buy you the mountain.
I will never let the world touch you. I will never let anyone hurt our child. "
I pressed my face harder into her belly, weeping openly, surrendering every scrap of my name, my pride, and my future into the hem of her cardigan.
Above me, the cottage was dead quiet save for the crackle of the birch fire and the sound of my ruined gasps.
A soft, hesitant warmth brushed the crown of my head.
Her small, trembling hand rose in the air, hovered for one agonizing heartbeat, and then her fingers slid slowly into the damp, dark hair at the back of my neck.
Her palm curved around my skull, cradling my head against the softness of her stomach.
A single, hot tear dropped from her chin, splashing against the back of my neck.
The war was over.
And in the glow of the woodstove, the broken pieces began to mend.