Chapter Three
“She’s precious,” Sierra said, though her throat felt too tight. The tiniest little bundle in her arms looked like a squished alien, and yet she was precious.
Beckett sat next to Kaitlin on her hospital bed and Sierra and Kaitlin’s parents sat on a little couch in the corner. Their brother, Luke, and his wife, Melanie, stood next to them. They’d all taken turns holding little Ellie.
Sierra didn’t want to let her go, though she knew it was time to leave. Time to face the music.
She wasn’t going back to Kaitlin’s apartment tonight. Well, she supposed it was morning now, a whole new day. The day before had been a whirlwind. The morning with Kaitlin going into labor, Sierra driving to the next town over to get a pregnancy test during the wait for Ellie’s arrival. The box had told her it was too early to tell, and still she’d been determined to see that negative sign and feel some relief even if not total.
But there’d been a positive one instead. Early and everything.
Her life had changed in that Walmart bathroom, and she’d driven straight home to the house she and Carter had shared once upon a time, to tell him. She’d felt no more wishy-washy wondering if she should suck it up, wait him out, whatever.
She’d just known, in that crystal-clear moment of a positive pregnancy test: her life had to change. She was going to have a baby, and even if something happened to it, she didn’t ever want to go back to being the version of herself who’d crawled into a little box the past few months and basically given up.
No. Life was going to change.
As she held the newborn in her arms, she knew she couldn’t even begin to fathom how much. But she was determined to be ready. To be strong. Maybe her whole life had been one of failure, but she would not fail her child. If she promised herself nothing else, it would be that.
Which meant giving Ellie back to her exhausted but joyous parents, telling her own parents she was moving home for a while, and… Well, she wasn’t ready to tell anyone but Carter about the pregnancy yet. Not so early. But she’d start preparing nonetheless.
“We should let you two get some sleep,” Mom said, a clear nudge in Sierra’s direction to relinquish her hold on the baby. “Well it’s you three now, isn’t it?”
Sierra forced herself to turn to Kaitlin who sat in the hospital bed, puffy face and bags under her eyes, and yet with the kind of contented smile Sierra wanted to find for herself.
She’d never have it with a man who shut her out, who clearly saw her for what she was. She would need to be someone other than what she was for her child, and she couldn’t do that with Carter at her side. He was too perfect, and he’d always remind her of that.
When Ellie began to fuss, Sierra murmured, “Here’s your mama,” and Ellie snuggled into Kaitlin’s chest. Kaitlin met Sierra’s gaze and lifted her eyebrows, a clear question.
Sierra gave a quick nod and Kaitlin reached out and gave her arm a squeeze. Simple as that, her sister was offering support. And to keep quiet about it. A sister Sierra had never been all that kind to. They’d been too different, but it didn’t seem to matter now.
Even in the sadness of knowing she had to move on from Carter and all the failures of the past year, there was a kind of hope in that. Things could change. Things could get better. Maybe not marriage things, but life things.
She shuffled out of the room with her parents and brother and sister-in-law, murmuring goodbyes to the happy couple and the fussing baby. A nurse gave them a kindly smile as she slid through the door while they exited.
Sierra trudged with her family through the hospital and toward the parking lot. She was sure it was just paranoia that it felt like every person they passed in the lobby stared at her.
“We’re over this way,” Luke said, pointing to the far side of the parking lot. The family said their goodbyes and though Sierra was parked somewhere in between the two, she trailed after her parents.
“Um, Mom and Dad. I… Would it be okay if…” She shoved her hands into her coat pockets, too hot in the face with embarrassment to feel the chill of the air around them.
Mom and Dad turned, exchanged one of those old married couple looks that caused a lance of pain to go through Sierra’s chest. Even at their best, she and Carter hadn’t had that.
Mom enveloped her in a hard, warm hug. “Have we really made it this hard for you to say you need to come home?” Mom sounded…hurt, almost. Which was odd. Her parents were always so stoic. She knew what they were feeling based on what they said, not what they sounded like.
“No, I just…”
“We’re sorry things didn’t work out, Sierra,” Dad said, in his same old gruff way, but the words were soft somehow. Her father who’d never been particularly soft. “I know we weren’t exactly supportive, but I hope you know we always support you.”
“Who told you?” she managed to ask.
Mom cleared her throat, twisting her fingers together in a rare sign of unease. “I overheard some nurses talking about… Well, they said Dr. McArthur’s wife was leaving him. At first I thought they meant Gerald, but that seems unlikely and now you’re asking to come home, so…”
“We’re getting divorced,” Sierra forced herself to say, bald and plain, because she couldn’t take her parents trying to convince her she was wrong. Telling her she had to fix things. “I know your feelings on divorce.”
Mom and Dad shared another look.
Dad cleared his throat. “I know we’ve been hard sometimes. It was the way we were raised, the way we thought it best to raise ours. We’re trying to be a little better by you three these days. I don’t support divorce unilaterally, no, but…like I said, Sierra, we’ll always support you.”
“Follow us home. It’s too cold to talk in this parking lot like this. We’ll make you some… Goodness, what time even is it? We’ll eat a meal and you can talk to us and tell us what you need.”
Sierra blinked at her mother. When had her parents changed? Opened and softened? Asked her what she needed?
She frowned a little because she had this horrifying thought all of a sudden that it wasn’t them who had changed. It was her. Like she’d grown up a little and realized the world, and they, weren’t out to get her.
She forced a smile and a nod and headed for her car, where she’d already thrown all the things she’d taken to Kaitlin’s, to follow Mom and Dad home.
But Mom’s words kept bouncing around in her head as she drove through the bizarre morning that felt like it should be night after being in a dark hospital room for a while.
Tell us what you need.
She wanted to. Tell her parents everything so they could fix this for her, but she knew they couldn’t, but worse, so much worse…
What if she didn’t know what she needed?
*
Carter never got drunk. There had been very few times in his life where he’d flirted with the edge of it. The night he’d met Sierra and his wedding night were about it. A little tipsy on alcohol and Sierra, both times. But that was very much it. He was a McArthur, expected to be in control always.
After Sierra had dropped her pregnancy bomb, then sauntered away so certain divorce was an inevitability, Carter had sat at his desk and stared at his lists.
It had been strange to sit there and not want to make new ones. He’d felt empty and numb and filled with zero desire to make a list or fill out a calendar. He couldn’t even find it in himself to do the math to figure out when their baby—baby—would be due.
Sometime around midnight, something inside of him had clicked. Maybe snapped. He’d gotten up, walked straight to the kitchen, found a sealed, expensive bottle of liquor his father had given him for some occasion or other. Carter didn’t even bother to read the label to see what kind it was.
He just started to drink. Right out of the bottle. There wasn’t much point to stopping either. There was no one to perform for. It didn’t matter if he got drunk because there was literally no one here who cared what he did.
Something cracked inside of him, only it wasn’t all that painful. Maybe it was the booze running though his system, but it almost felt freeing. He didn’t have to be perfect for his father—who wasn’t even his father. His mother had two other children to rely on now that Cole was home for good, and quite frankly, they were the children she hadn’t lied to their whole lives.
And Sierra was gone. Pregnant with his child and intent on divorce.
It didn’t make any sense. Alcohol didn’t either, he supposed, but the addition of quite a bit of it into his system made that seem rather funny instead of soul-crushingly awful. He managed to drink his way through a good three-fourths of the bottle over the course of the evening.
He watched the sun rise through the kitchen window in a drunken stupor and then figured he might as well burn all his plans. They were ash anyway. Luckily, the living room fireplace only required the flip of a switch and he had a nice little blaze.
Sierra had complained about the gas fireplace, saying a wood-burning one was so much more authentic.
“But it doesn’t do for the drunken burning of things, does it, babe?” Carter said into the empty room, grabbing a handful of the lists and printed papers off his desk. He marched back to the living room where the fire danced easily if not authentically.
He dropped the papers on the floor, then picked up one sheet of paper. The second-honeymoon ideas. He tossed it in. Then his calendar where he’d planned out a timetable of when he’d win her back by.
Goodbye, calendar. Goodbye, lists. Goodbye, life.
It was very lucky he was drunk, because he didn’t have the wherewithal to panic at the fact his life was over and gone. He didn’t have to worry it felt that way even though he had a job—an important job. The kind of job only people like him could do.
Except he’d believed that because of all that McArthur blood coursing through his veins. He’d believed he was offering a service to the world because that was the McArthur way.
He wasn’t a McArthur.
He wasn’t a McArthur.
Months of that sentence marching around inside of him, and he’d never allowed himself to fully form the words. Say it. He’d been too numb, too horrified. So he’d simply let it sit there on the edges, much like Sierra.
“I’m not a McArthur,” he forced himself to say aloud and into the fire.
Carter slowly lowered himself to the floor, something horrible and clawing working through him. An emotion he couldn’t push away, something like a sob if he was the kind of man who cried. The kind of man who broke.
But he wasn’t that. Except when he rubbed his hands over his face, sitting on the cold floor with the heat of his fake fire on his face, his palms came away wet, and that horrible, clawing feeling dug in deeper and worse.
So, alcohol was in fact a terrible idea. No more of that. No, he should have thrown himself into work. That was familiar. That wasn’t dangerous or confronting. It didn’t bring all his shields down and force him to face an ugly truth that he’d messed this all up on his own.
It took three rings of the doorbell for him to realize that’s what the sound was. He managed to crawl to his feet and stumble to the front door.
There seemed to be two or three doorknobs to choose from, which of course wasn’t possible, and still he couldn’t focus enough to get a hand on the knob on the first try.
Third time was the charm and he managed to swing the door open. In his drunken state, he didn’t know who to expect. The couple before him in the soft morning light was at the bottom of that nonexistent list though.
His brother stood on his stoop, Jess standing next to him. It was so strange to stand here and realize he was more like Jess than Cole. Jess had been a foster kid who’d befriended Cole in high school, and because of her nursing aspirations, Dad had taken her under his wing.
Carter might as well be a foster kid to his father, meanwhile Cole—the screw-up rodeo star who’d refused everything Dad had tried to mold him into—was actually a McArthur.
Jess’s eyes widened and she looked up at Cole. “He’s drunk.” Jess looked at the watch on her wrist. “At eight in the morning.”
Carter laughed at the comically shocked look on Jess’s face. Cole didn’t look quite so shocked, but then Cole didn’t know him. Not really. They were acquaintances at best. Carter used to think it was his superiority that kept them separated—as much as Cole running away to rodeo for almost ten years—but maybe it was that lack of McArthur blood to bind them.
“Half brother,” Carter mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“We’re not brothers, are we? We’re half brothers.”
“So?”
Carter shrugged and turned away from them both. He stumbled a bit as the floor seemed to tilt underneath him. Luckily the wall came up out of nowhere to hold him up and steady. “To what do I owe the visit?”
“Mom’s worried.”
“So, she sent you.” Carter collapsed onto the couch. Standing seemed like too much, too hard.
“No. She sent Lina. Who refused. But then asked Jess to check in on you, and I figured I should come along.”
Carter stared up at the white ceiling. “Why’d Lina refuse?”
“It isn’t important,” Jess said gently.
Cole sat himself at the edge of the couch, easily knocking Carter’s legs to the floor, though Carter managed to keep his body on the cushion. “She said you’re a self-centered ass who hurt her friend and she won’t pander to your sorry bullshit.”
Jess sighed. “It wasn’t important,” she grumbled. “It isn’t time to take sides.”
Carter squinted up at Jess who hovered there above him at the arm of the couch. She and Cole had been high school sweethearts before Cole had taken off for the rodeo. But now they were a couple again, somehow figuring out their past mistakes and finding love. Here and now.
Why did they get that?
“You’d take Sierra’s side though if it was time to take sides.” He didn’t bother to phrase it as a question. Sierra might not have won over his parents, but Sierra, Lina and Jess had formed some sister-ish bond. “You both would.” Because there was no love lost between him and his brother. He sat up, his head going fuzzy and wishy-washy, but that didn’t change the spark of emotion inside of him. “Only I didn’t do anything. I don’t know why she left. I didn’t do anything.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Jess offered.
“Relationships are hard work,” Cole said seriously, as though he had any idea.
“I suppose that’s why you shirked yours for ten years,” Carter said, and even drunk he knew it was too harsh, but he didn’t need his younger, half-brother’s lectures when he hadn’t done anything wrong. And Cole hadn’t been here.
Cole’s mouth firmed, but then he nodded. “I suppose it is.” Cole studied Carter and Carter merely scowled.
“Have you ever had to try hard at something?” Cole asked.
Carter bristled, because that wasn’t a real question. It was one of those questions where the person was so sure they already had the answer. Except who had been here the past ten years? Who had stayed by Mom and Dad’s side? Certainly not Cole. “I have worked my ass off for years to—”
“Working hard and trying hard aren’t always the same thing, Carter. You might have put in a lot of hours, a lot of sweat. Obviously you worked hard to become a doctor, but was any of that a struggle for you? Has anything ever been a struggle? A failure you had to overcome? Or is this the first time life said: not so fast, hotshot?”
Carter pushed off the couch. “Fuck off, Cole.”
“Look, I know you don’t want to hear it from me, but I am just trying to help.”
Jess reached out, touching Carter’s arm lightly. “Have you talked to anyone—really talked—about how you’re feeling?”
“I’m feeling drunk, Jess. It’s quite nice.”
“Carter—”
“My wife is leaving me.” He opened his mouth to go on. My pregnant wife is leaving me. Except… He didn’t want to expose himself that deeply. “How am I supposed to feel?”
“Sierra loves you. I know she does.” Jess looked torn. “But love requires a certain amount of communication.”
Cole stood, and Carter was struck by how much his brother looked like him, even though he hadn’t seen him in years. Even though they were polar opposites in doing and thinking, they were so similar physically. All Mom—blue eyes and blond hair. Their differences had to have been the differences in their fathers.
Carter felt…defenseless. Except he had a defense. A million of them. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t know why she left. I don’t know what you want from me.”
“You mean… You haven’t talked about why she wants a divorce?” Jess asked, sounding slightly horrified.
“I told her we needed to talk and she said I’d had all the time in the world to talk and it was too late. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“I think you’re supposed to talk.”
Carter glared at his brother. “Why are you of all people lecturing me?”
“Because I’ve had to learn a thing or two about opening up and talking.”
Cole and Jess exchanged a look that made Carter’s stomach turn. He hated when people did that. He and Sierra had never mastered that art every other couple he knew had. To simply look at each other and know what the other was thinking.
He refused to believe it was because he didn’t love her, or because they’d rushed into marriage, or any of the other things his parents would happily ascribe it to. It was just he and Sierra weren’t built that way. It didn’t mean they didn’t belong together.
Except, here they were, very much not together.
“If there is anything Dad taught me, it’s that you have to fight for what you want. Getting onto the rodeo circuit was never easy. Coming home wasn’t and still isn’t easy. Hell, a relationship with Jess isn’t easy, and that’s still a hell of a lot easier than any relationship with Mom or Dad. You’ve had a lot of easy, Carter, no matter how hard you’ve worked. But now it’s time for the hard stuff, and I know deep down, there’s a man who can take it on.”
“How on earth do you know that?” Carter asked, that horrible clawing feeling growing inside him again. That awful sob-like thing building up inside of him.
“I know not being Dad’s is a blow,” Cole said in a quiet, serious voice that disturbed Carter if only because his brother was usually stoic and determined. Hard. There was a softness to this. “But regardless of the blood pumping in your veins, who you are and how you act are your decisions to make. You’re like him because you’ve wanted to be, but maybe it’s time to open your eyes to what you know deep down. You’re not as cold and hard as he is. You never have been, no matter how hard you’ve tried. I’d say if anything your marriage to Sierra proves that.”
“I only ever wanted to be him,” Carter whispered, staring at his hands. Hands he used to think were just like Dad’s. “He was always…right.”
“No, he just thought he was and made everyone too afraid to cross him.”
Carter lifted his gaze. “Except you.”
“We’re different people, Carter. Not because of our blood, but because of our souls. Whatever in your soul prompted you to fall for Sierra and marry her, whatever part of your soul is causing you to drink and lose control over the loss of her, that’s the part you need to follow.”
“But that part feels powerless and stupid and weak.”
“So make it strong. It’s either that or lose Sierra.”
Carter looked into his brother’s blue eyes and felt something like brotherly kinship for the first time in their lives. Make it strong.
What a strange concept. Foreign. But losing Sierra wasn’t an option, so maybe it was time to find some other side of himself.
Not a McArthur. Not what he thought he was or even what the knowledge he wasn’t Dad’s blood son had done to him, but Carter McArthur. Owner of this body, this soul.
And desperately in love with a woman who didn’t want his last name—a name that wasn’t even his.
It was a mess. A terrible mess, and while he wasn’t any good at cleaning up messes, like Cole said…
Maybe it was time to start.