Chapter 11
chapter
eleven
Oliver
She goes down like a candle flame in a strong wind.
One second she’s in my arms, her head against my chest, the warm weight of her swaying with me through the last bars of the song. The next, her fingers are digging into my shoulder with a grip that has nothing to do with dancing and everything to do with holding on.
I feel it before I see it. The way her body changes—the particular quality of dead weight that’s different from relaxed weight, that split-second when a living thing stops cooperating with gravity.
“Cora.”
No response. Or rather, a response that sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a well.
I don’t think. I react. My arm locks around her waist before her knees finish their betrayal, pulling her hard against my chest, my other hand coming up to cup the back of her head, pressing her face against my shoulder.
She’s warm. She’s breathing. She’s not unconscious—not quite—but she’s not fully here either.
“Hey. Hey.” I keep my voice low. Controlled. I’ve talked down spooked animals in the dark. I’ve called calm into a situation while everything was going sideways. I know how to be steady when steady is the only thing that helps. “I’ve got you. Lean into me.”
“I’m fine,” she mumbles into my collarbone.
She is not fine. Her legs are barely functional and she’s gripping my shirt like it’s the only fixed point in a moving world.
“You’re not fine. You’re about to pass out.”
“I don’t pass out.” The words are slurred around the edges. “I’m not a passing-out person.”
“Mischief,” I say it quietly, into her hair. Not loud enough for anyone nearby to hear. Just for her. The bar name. Our name. The one that existed before everything got complicated. “Stop talking and breathe.”
A beat. Then I feel her chest expand. Once, slow, deliberate. Then again.
Good girl.
I don’t bother with worrying about the optics of this. I just swing her up into my arms. I carry her towards the parking lot. I holler at my brother, Payton, who jogs over immediately.
“Shit,” he says. “Everything okay?”
“I’m thinking dehydration.”
He thumbs over his shoulder back at the crowd. “Want me to grab Uncle Graham to take a look at her?”
“No, I’m going to take her in and have her checked out. Can you let everyone know?”
“Yeah, of course, man. Let me know if you need me to do anything else.”
“Thanks.”
Cora tries to say something, but I shush her.
“You can yell at me later, Mischief. Right now, I’m in charge.”
Once we reach my truck, I load her in and push on her back a little. “Head down,” I say. “Between your knees.”
She goes without argument. That alone tells me how bad it was, because Cora, without an argument, is Cora at the end of her rope.
“Breathe, darlin’, just breathe.” I rub circles on her back. I listen to her breathing even out. Watch the rigid line of her shoulders slowly soften. “When’s the last time you ate?” I ask.
“I ate.”
“What did you eat?”
A pause that lasts two beats too long. “A cracker. Some crackers.”
I stare at the side of her bowed head. “Crackers.” I keep my voice flat. “You’re at a barbecue. There is a hundred and fifty pounds of brisket, twenty yards behind you. And you ate crackers. I made you a plate.”
She pushes against me, leaning herself back up. “Thank you for the plate. It was very thoughtful of you.” She shakes her head. “I was nervous. When I’m nervous my stomach—” She stops. I can hear the exact moment she realizes she’s said too much. The words just cut off, like a switch flipped.
I wait.
“Your stomach what?” I ask. Quiet. Careful.
“Nothing. It’s nothing. I just get lightheaded sometimes.
Low blood sugar. It’s a thing.” She lifts her head slowly.
The color is coming back to her face, but her eyes are still careful.
Guarded in a way that’s become familiar—the exact look she gets when she’s managing information.
Deciding what to give me and what to keep. “See? Fine. Totally fine.”
She is not fine.
And I’m done pretending I don’t know why.
Every piece I’ve been filing away for a week—every morning when she’s sick down the hall.
The water tonight. The ridiculous number of open cracker packages at the house.
All of those pieces of information assemble themselves in my chest with the solid, definitive click of something falling into place.
I’ve known. I think I’ve known for days. I just wasn’t ready to know I knew.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” I say.
She turns quickly to face me. “What? No.”
“You almost collapsed.”
“I got dizzy. There’s a difference.”
“You couldn’t hold yourself upright.”
“I was leaning. Strategically.”
I look at her. “Into me. At a forty-five-degree angle. With your eyes rolled back.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
It is not an exaggeration. I watched her eyes go and felt my heart stop. I’ve done plenty of things on our ranch that should have toughened me past that kind of reaction. Apparently not. Not when it comes to Cora.
I look at her straight on, and I let her see it—the thing I don’t usually put on my face because I don’t usually let it get there.
Worry. Real worry. The kind you can’t dress up as anything else.
“Something is wrong,” I say. “And you’re going to tell me what it is.”
“Nothing is wrong, Oliver.”
“I’m getting in and driving you to Saddle Creek Memorial, whether you like it or not.”
“I got lightheaded.”
“Darlin’, you looked like you were about to meet Jesus.”
She pulls in a breath. “I wasn’t going to meet Jesus. I was going to meet the ground. Briefly.”
I reach over to palm her cheek. Those pale green eyes track my movement.
She calculates, measures, and considers all her options and comes up empty.
She is exhausted. She has been exhausted, and I’ve been watching it through walls and closed doors and purple-ink sticky notes, and I am done watching.
“I’m not going to the hospital,” she says.
I start my truck. “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that one. Buckle up, Mischief.”
“This is kidnapping,” she says.
“Noted. You can file a complaint with the sheriff later.”
It takes approximately eleven minutes to Saddle Creek Memorial.
I drive the way I always drive—both hands, steady pace, eyes on the road. But I’m aware of every sound she makes. Every shift of her hands in her lap. The way she keeps clenching and unclenching her fingers like she’s trying to work something out through her palms.
“This is really unnecessary,” she says. Third time.
“Maybe, but I’m going to get a medical professional’s opinion.”
“I have some medical experience.”
“And I bet you’re great at it,” I say. “Yet, your hands are shaking.”
Silence. I can feel her looking down at her hands. Feel the particular quality of her stillness when she’s caught something she didn’t want caught.
“That’s from the cold,” she says.
I reach over. Adjust the climate controls. Warm air floods the cab. I put my hand back on the wheel.
I don’t say it’s seventy-eight degrees out.
Neither of us says anything for the last four minutes.
Thankfully, the ER lot is quiet. Saturday night in Saddle Creek—a couple of trucks, a security guard working through the end of his shift. I park, come around to her side, and have the door open before she can reach the handle.
“I can walk,” she says.
“I know you can.”
I don’t touch her. I stay close enough that if her knees decide to quit again, I’ll catch her before she hits the ground. She doesn’t wobble. Her jaw is set, her chin is up, and she walks through those sliding doors like she’s walking into a courtroom.
That’s Cora. Even when she’s terrified, she faces the door.
Inside, the fluorescent lights are brutal after the string lights and the stars. A triage nurse named Dolores, whose lanyard badge photo looks like it was taken during a different presidential administration, takes one look at Cora and points to a wheelchair.
“I don’t need—”
“Sweetie, I don’t even know what you’re supposed to look like, but your pallor is downright grassy. Sit in the chair.” Her tone brooks no argument.
She sits.
Dolores wheels her through a curtain. “Y’all are lucky, we’re slow as molasses tonight.”
The triage bay is tiny. Two chairs, a medical cabinet, and standard equipment. I feel like I’m taking up too much space, but I’ll be damned if I’m leaving Cora.
I just cross my arms and stay quiet while Dolores works through the intake questions. Blood pressure. Pulse. Temperature. Medications. Allergies. “Date of your last period?”
“Uh,” Cora says.
“Any chance you could be pregnant?”
The question lands like a dropped wrench.
I don’t move. I don’t change my breathing. I have spent my entire adult life learning to be the steadiest thing in a room when everything else is in motion, and I call on every bit of that right now, because the alternative is letting the thing that just cracked open in my chest show on my face.
The silence coming from Cora stretches.
One second. Two. Three.
Dolores looks up from her tablet.
Cora meets the nurse’s eyes, and I watch her—even from behind, even from six feet away, I can see the moment she stops calculating escape routes and accepts that there aren’t any.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dolores says, gently. “How far along?”
“About fourteen weeks.” Cora’s voice is barely above a whisper. Barely holding. “I think.”
I stare at the curtain.
Fourteen weeks.
The math is instantaneous and merciless. Fourteen weeks. Three and a half months. A rainy night. A gravel lot by a river. A truck cab with fogged windows and a box of condoms my siblings had thought was hilarious.
Fourteen weeks.
She has been living in my grandparents’ house, making my dinner, leaving me notes in purple ink, scanning photographs of people she barely knows until ten o’clock at night—and she has been carrying this. Alone. For the entire time I’ve been there.
Dolores says something about bloodwork. Something about iron and blood sugar. She pats Cora’s knee and disappears through the curtain.