Chapter 4
chapter
four
Cora
Three months later…
If I’d known the hottest man I’d ever met was going to disappear into the night like some kind of emotionally unavailable cowboy cryptid, I might’ve at least stolen his wallet.
Or his driver’s license.
Something.
Instead, all I got was one perfect night, a hat crease still burned into my memory, and a baby currently the size of a lime making me gag every morning before eight.
“Not that I’m blaming you,” I mutter, rubbing a hand over my soft stomach.
Currently, I’m standing in my new house.
Okay, technically it’s not my house, but I am living here.
Being an in-home healthcare worker for Mimz and Pops Blankenship definitely has its perks.
Including room and board and stellar pay.
Frankly, I’m not even sure why they hired me. They’re currently off on a seven-day Caribbean cruise. They might be senior citizens, but they are still spry and active. More active than me, at least these days.
Morning light pours through the window above the sink, catching the dust motes that float lazily through the warm air. The whole room smells like butter and toasted bread. Well, bagel, but same difference.
“Your father and I were both active participants in the poor decision-making.” I tell my stomach.
The toaster pops.
I jump hard enough to slosh coffee onto the counter, the hot liquid pooling against the tile backsplash.
“Cool,” I say to no one. “We’re all thriving.”
I grab a towel and wipe it up, pressing the heel of my hand against my sternum where my heart is still hammering like a startled rabbit’s.
I need to get it together. My nerves have been like this for weeks—raw and close to the surface, like someone peeled a layer of skin off my composure and forgot to put it back.
That’s what happens when you grow up believing that childhood cancer and subsequent radiation treatments left you infertile, then you get pregnant from a one-off in a truck with a condom. This baby is meant to be. I know that much for sure.
The house has felt too quiet since Mimz and Pops left for their cruise five days ago.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet—the kind that hums. The kind that gives my brain room to spiral.
Without their voices filling these rooms—Pops humming off-key while he shuffles to the coffeepot, Mimz calling out Cora, honey, come look at this ridiculous bird from the back porch—the silence just becomes space.
And space is where all my worst thoughts live.
They’d tried to take me with them—which was sweet, if not completely insane.
“Come with us, and you can flirt with old people in matching visors,” Mimz had said while packing sixteen outfits for a seven-day trip, her silver hair pinned in hot rollers, reading glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. “We might need your assistance finding our room.”
Pops had leaned in and stage-whispered, “She means she plans to drink enough umbrella beverages to forget I snore and maybe where our room is.”
They’d laughed. I’d laughed.
But truly, if morning sickness had me this queasy on land, I knew I couldn’t abide it on a ship. So I’d made an excuse about a class I needed to update my certification in.
They’d left, and then I’d cried in the bathroom after they left because apparently pregnancy hormones are legit and I now weep over elderly people enjoying maritime vacations.
I’d sat on the edge of the tub with my face in my hands and sobbed until my ribs ached, and when I was done, I washed my face and ate an entire sleeve of saltines standing over the sink like a raccoon.
Still, this job had dropped into my lap like a miracle.
Two kind people who’d found out I was pregnant and reacted by arguing over whether I needed more iron or more naps. Not horror. Not judgment. Not the long, pitying silence I’d braced for. Just—love. The plain, uncomplicated kind I’d spent my whole life not knowing how to receive.
I’d never had anyone fuss over me before.
It was… nice.
Dangerously nice.
The kind of nice that makes a girl who grew up sleeping in six different beds before she turned twelve start thinking words like home and stay. And that’s the most dangerous thing of all.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Jules
I hit the speaker and tuck it between my shoulder and ear while carrying my coffee toward the living room. The floorboards creak under my bare feet—the third one from the kitchen always groans a little, and I’ve gotten used to the sound, the way you get used to the particular voice of a place.
“Tell me you’re horizontal and eating crackers,” Jules says by way of greeting.
“I’m vertical and drinking coffee.”
“That baby is going to come out caffeinated and sarcastic.”
“Then they’ll have come to the right family.”
The word slips out before I can stop it.
Family.
It lands in the room like a stone dropped into still water. I feel the ripple of it in my chest—that quiet, aching thing I can never quite name. Want, maybe. Or the ghost of it.
I stare out the front window at the quiet street lined with pecan trees and neat yards.
A mockingbird is going through its whole repertoire on the fence post, and somewhere down the block, a sprinkler is ticking in slow, lazy circles.
This town looks like something someone painted from memory—soft-edged and too gentle to be entirely real.
Jules softens immediately. “You like it there.”
I blow across my coffee and watch the steam curl. “I like the room with its own bathroom and the fact that Pops thinks all vegetables can be improved with bacon.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I hate when she knows me too well. When her voice goes quiet and certain like that, it’s like she’s holding a mirror up, and I can’t look away fast enough.
“It’s temporary,” I say. The word tastes stale in my mouth. I’ve said it so many times it should feel like armor by now, but lately it just feels like something I’m hiding behind.
“Mmm.”
“That was a judgmental mmm.”
“That was a best-friend-who-has-eyes mmm.”
I roll mine. “They’re nice to me, okay? They make me feel…”
I trail off. My throat tightens around whatever comes next. I press my thumbnail into the ceramic of my mug—hard—because the small bite of pressure keeps me from going soft in all the places I can’t afford to be soft.
“Wanted?” Jules supplies gently.
I swallow.
“Maybe.”
There’s a beat. The kind that holds more than words. Jules doesn’t fill it, and I love her for that. She knows there are rooms inside me I don’t open for anyone, and she just sits outside the door and waits.
“And have you thought any more about trying to find Cowboy?”
I snort. “Very funny. Let me just post flyers. Wanted: one devastatingly hot ranch man with commitment issues and strong thighs.”
“You forgot suspicious eyes and excellent oral skills.”
“Jules!”
“What? Accuracy matters.”
I laugh despite myself. The sound comes out lighter than I feel. “I never truly experienced his oral skills outside of the kissing, so I can only surmise he’d be a boss downtown.”
The truth is, I had thought about finding him. For approximately ten thousand embarrassing minutes.
Late at night, mostly, when the house is dark, and the ceiling fan turns slowly overhead, and I can’t sleep because the nausea hasn’t quite learned the difference between morning and midnight.
I lie there with one hand on my stomach and replay every single detail.
The roughness of his palms. The way he’d said like honey with my fingers against his lips.
The weight of his hat on my head—warm from his body, smelling like cedar and rain and him.
But all I had was Cowboy, a truck, and the memory of hands that could make a woman forget her own zip code.
Not exactly searchable data.
I’ve even gone into Ace’s a few times, hoping to run across him.
“No,” I say quieter. “I haven’t.”
Another lie. They’re stacking up like dishes in a sink I keep meaning to wash.
Every morning, I wake up carrying a tiny reminder of him.
Every morning, the nausea rolls in and I think, You did this to me, you beautiful, nameless disaster of a man.
Every night I remember the way he’d looked at me, like he was seeing me.
Past the piercings, past the ink, to the girl inside.
That part of me that no one ever seems to truly see.
Nobody had ever looked at me like that.
I’d be stupid not to think about him.
I set my mug down on the kitchen counter and tug the towel tighter around my chest. I’d just gotten out of the shower when my stomach had growled… loudly. I’ve learned in the last few days that when that happens, food is imperative and needed immediately to stave off nausea.
So with my hair damp and dripping cool trails down my shoulders, I’d moved into the kitchen to make myself breakfast. I butter my bagel and don’t even wait for the butter to fully melt before taking a bite.
The ink on my forearm is vivid against my clean skin—the star on my wrist, the vine that wraps my ribs, all the marks I chose for myself when nobody else was choosing me.
I should get dressed and be productive.
Instead, I’d been walking around barefoot in Mimz’s kitchen, listening to nineties country. Occasionally singing along to Reba with a wooden spoon as a microphone. Until Jules called, so I could talk about the man who’d knocked up my heart before he ever knocked me up for real.
Healthy.
Very healthy.
“Okay,” Jules says. “What’s the plan today?”
“Laundry. Maybe reorganize the pantry because Pops organizes everything by height, and it’s a travesty.
“Hot.”
“And maybe I’ll sit on the porch and imagine a future where I’m emotionally stable.”
“Dream big, babe.”
A truck door slams outside.
I freeze. Every muscle in my body goes rigid, my fingers tightening on the edge of the towel.
“You hear that?” I ask.
“Hear what?”