Chapter 13
Lee
My weekend in the mountains had done wonders to clear my mind and help me realize what was important in life. I couldn’t be hung up on Farrah. It was affecting my work. I was barely sleeping, I wasn’t eating right and I was overworking myself. I had to stop obsessing about it and the weekend had helped me do that.
When I arrived back in Packwood on Sunday evening, I felt like a new man. I was ready for a normal week ahead, focusing on the right things. Hank and I had a job to do and I was going to help out my sister the way I had always done. The tourists and hikers would come and go the way they always did and there was no reason to be stuck on someone the way I had been stuck on Farrah.
I couldn’t let every pretty face that came across my path distract me like that. But Farrah had been different, I told myself. She wasn’t only a pretty face. She had been interesting, smart and complicated.
But I pushed the thoughts away because had to stop thinking about her.
The forest ranger offices were right next to the tourist bureau. As a result, we often had visitors that we had to redirect to the tourism offices. Every now and then a tourist ended up on my doorstep when someone else needed to help them instead.
It was late when I returned from my camping trip and I had to swing by the office to pick up a few files I wanted to look over tonight sometime before I headed to the office in the morning. I may have decided that I was over Farrah, but I still wanted to be sure I had something to do if I couldn’t keep her off my mind.
I was in the office when I noticed a car pull up. Whoever was looking for the tourist office on a Sunday evening was going to have to wait until Monday morning, no matter who they were looking for.
When I stepped outside, I noticed the car. My heart tripped and I couldn’t help a smile breaking over my face when the driver stepped out.
Farrah looked like a dream. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and it made her face look almost regal. She walked toward me and I noticed again how graceful she was.
So much for all that time I had taken to get her off my mind. The moment I saw her again, none of it mattered. I had missed her the whole week, thinking I’d never see here again, and now here she was.
She didn’t look as happy to see me as I was to see her though. Her face was serious and she walked toward me, as if she wasn’t sure if I was going to welcome her. I frowned. Something was wrong.
“Are you alright?” I asked, when she reached me.
She didn’t answer me. Without saying a word she took a large brown envelope out of her bag and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s so you don’t think I lied to you,” she said.
I frowned, looking at the file again. What was she talking about? She looked so serious it had to be something big, but I couldn’t figure out what she was going on about. I opened the file. It was filled with medical papers, jargon I didn’t understand and sheets that dated back several years.
I shook my head and closed the files again.
“Why don’t you just tell me what this is about?” I asked.
Farrah looked around. “Can we go inside?” she asked, looking resigned.
Nodding, I turned, stepping back into the office. I closed the door behind her and she took a seat in the chair across from my desk. I sat down and looked at her, waiting for her to tell me what the hell was going on.
I hadn’t expected to see her again, never mind so soon after she had left. And I hadn’t expected her to look like she was on the verge of breaking down.
Farrah swallowed hard and I watched as she struggled to find the words. I wasn’t sure if she was struggling with another one of her inner conflicts, or if something was seriously wrong. What could she possibly tell me? That she was in a relationship? I would be pissed off, but it had nothing to do with me. Farrah and I weren’t a thing so I had no right to exclusivity. She couldn’t tell me anything else that would really make a difference, could she? I tried to figure it out and couldn’t find anything.
I barely knew the woman. I was wildly attracted to her and we had spent a wonderful night together, but I didn’t know anything about her that she hadn’t told me herself last weekend.
“Farrah,” I said, when she was quiet for a long time. She was tripping herself up, I could see it. She was so damn scared to talk to me she couldn’t even find the words. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
She looked at me for only a second before she started to cry.
Shit.
I had no idea what to do with a crying woman. For a moment I wondered if she was one of those crazy emotional types and I had gotten myself ensnared without knowing about it. But Farrah wasn’t like that. I knew she wasn’t. Holly, who was too young to be with me and too young to stubborn to accept that I wasn’t ever going to be with her, maybe. But not Farrah. She wasn’t like that.
She took a deep breath, trying to rein in her tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, unable to stop the tears from streaming down her cheeks. I wanted to walk around the table and hold her. She was even more vulnerable than the woman that had told me she needed me to help her be bold. She was breaking apart in front of me and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Instead of walking around the desk and holding her the way I wanted to, I let her fall apart alone. She was here to tell me something, and by the looks of things, it wasn’t good. I wasn’t sure what it could be. What could be important enough to have her drive all the way back to Packwood and sit down in front of me crying?
For a moment I wondered if it would be better if she spoke to a woman, instead.
“Do you want me to call Hannah?” I asked.
Farrah looked up at me, frowning.
“Maybe it will be easier to talk to a woman.” I wasn’t sure how I could help her. I was just a man and a crying woman scared the living shit out of me. I just didn’t know how to deal with the tears. I was good with everything else. I could handle broken bones or blood or even screaming and shouting, but I just wasn’t equipped for an emotional meltdown.
Farrah shook her head. “I need to talk to you about this. Hannah won’t be able to help me, no matter how great she is.”
I nodded slowly. I had hoped I could get my sister to come to the rescue, but it looked like I was in this alone. Farrah fished around in her handbag for a tissue and found nothing. She sighed and more tears rolled down her cheeks as if that was the last straw.
“I’ve always wanted kids,” Farrah said, finally talking. “When they said I couldn’t, I fought so long and so hard, but I finally gave up. I would never have had sex without protection if I’d known.” She started crying again. “Please, don’t hate me.”
What was she talking about?
“Why would I hate you?” I asked, still not understanding.
Farrah cried harder and I started to piece what she was saying together. The file. The trip. Her talk about protection and having kids. Farrah was telling me that she was having a baby.
My baby.
I was trying not to freak out. She hadn’t put it into so many words, but I had figured it out for myself. She was pregnant.
It didn’t make sense. None of it did. The first thing that popped into my mind was that she had told me that she couldn’t get pregnant and like a fool, I had trusted her. Idiot.
But then I looked at her, eyes red-rimmed from crying, and the look on her face like her world had been shattered. She didn’t look like a woman who had successfully tricked me. She looked like her world had just been upended. She hadn’t planned this any more than I had, and she had been just as blindsided as I was.
I had no idea how I felt about this. Maybe the shock hadn’t set in yet. I lived my life as a single man. It was my job to take care of tourists and hikers during the day but when I was off-duty, the only person I had to look out for was me. I didn’t have a problem with family, the right person just hadn’t come along. Now that it was happening, I realized I had to start thinking bigger than I did right now.
Still, the shock I had expected didn’t come. I wasn’t freaking out, I wasn’t upset or angry. I wasn’t much of anything. I was holding it all at arm’s length, studying the situation as if it was something I could hold in my hand and look at until I was comfortable with what it was.
Before I knew how I felt about it, I wanted to know exactly what I was looking at. The way she sat in front of me reminded me that she wasn’t a woman with an agenda. I had been with enough women to know what that looked like, and this wasn’t the same. Farrah was as honest and open as she had been from the start. She seemed genuine, which was what had hooked me from the start.
I looked it the file she had given me again. She had brought this to me as evidence, to show me that she hadn’t been lying to me or tried to trick me. It was enough. I didn’t need to read through it all to believe her. I wanted her to tell me in her own words what had happened. I wanted Farrah to tell me her story, instead of reading it in a medical file where everything was harsh and black on white.
When I looked at Farrah, I decided this wasn’t something we were going to do without water, tissues and a lot of compassion. I stood and walked to the little fridge. I took out a bottle of water for Farrah and a beer for me. I wasn’t going to do this without something to help me through. I handed her a towel to dry her eyes, because I realized I was out of tissues, then I walked back to my desk.
“Listen,” I said to her. She looked at me and her blue eyes were bright from crying. Her eyes were amazing. Today they were cerulean, changing with her mood. “I’m not angry, and I could never hate you. Just take a deep breath.”
She did as I suggested and blew it out again with a shudder. I could only imagine how hard this had to be for her.
“Now, tell me what happened.”