Cheyenne wasn’t an idiot. She hadn’t expected that one brief talk would fix every single issue they had been having. But she had sort of hoped it would at least make some of the problems better. That maybe Harry would have learned from the last time, and he would take her a bit more seriously when she said something was getting to her.
And in a way, he did get better at hearing her out, but mostly he got better at humoring her, rather than actually doing anything helpful about the situation. And Cheyenne knew something was going to have to change, or else the entire situation would just go the exact same way as it had the first time around, and Cheyenne would be out on her own again.
(She couldn’t quite keep her thoughts from jumping to the worst conclusions. Harry was a billionaire and a very respected individual. He could pay for the best doctors, the best schools, the best of everything. If they went their separate ways and Harry decided he wanted the kids, Cheyenne knew there wasn’t a judge in the country who would decide that she was the best person to raise them. She hadn’t met her three eventual children, and yet already she couldn’t bear the idea of being separated from them if it came to that.)
In an ideal world, Harry would be the one to change, to realize that yes indeed, Lorraine’s behavior was inappropriate, and he needed to stop defending her and start actually dealing with the problem. Cheyenne, after all, had no authority over Lorraine, and Lorraine had already made it abundantly clear that she didn’t care about Cheyenne’s opinions or preferences unless Harry explicitly told her she had to.
But Cheyenne knew that outcome was unlikely. She didn’t know much about Harry’s family life or his upbringing, but she was pretty sure it had never involved anyone telling him the words “you are wrong,” so he hadn’t exactly adapted to hearing them and reacting. And in an ideal world, Cheyenne would have the patience and the energy to try and work through that little…quirk, but for the time being, that simply wasn’t the case. She was slow and tired and achy, and she knew she still had another full trimester to go.
So, she knew, unfair though it was, if she wanted everything to go smoothly then, at least for the time being, she was going to have to be the one who changed. She would just have to stop engaging with Lorraine at all. Leave the room if Lorraine entered. Stay silent if Lorraine and Harry were speaking. Act as if Lorraine didn’t exist, basically. It grated at her nerves, but she could think of a better solution later, once she was no longer perpetually tired.
(She could practically smell maternity leave on the horizon, but she would hold out for a while longer, if only so she didn’t go crazy feeling like she was being completely unproductive. She liked to stay busy.)
Briefly, she toyed with the idea of using Daphne as her advocate to try and badger Harry into cooperating on her behalf, but she discarded the idea fairly quickly. Even living in his house for weeks at that point, Harry still barely knew Daphne beyond a few games of chess, and Cheyenne knew he wouldn’t be particularly inclined to put any stock in what she had to say if he didn’t even put any stock in what Cheyenne had to say.
So, she would just…hold out and be patient. Maybe not the best course of action, but it was the simplest, and it was about all she had the energy for at that point.
*
Granted, holding out, being patient, and pretending Lorraine didn’t exist in the same plane of reality as Cheyenne would have been easier if Harry was not something of an idiot. Doctor’s appointments were nothing out of the ordinary at that point, and typically they weren’t anything too exciting. And yet, Harry insisted on Cheyenne having someone with her when she went, in case the news was unfortunate. Typically, Daphne went with her. On a few occasions, it was Harry.
On that day, however, Daphne and Harry both had to work when her appointment was scheduled. And no matter how Cheyenne insisted that she could handle one appointment on her own—nothing had been out of the ordinary yet, aside from the fact that her pregnancy was a three-for-one special, so she really doubted something was going to go catastrophically wrong out of nowhere—Harry still insisted that she should have someone with her, until at last Cheyenne gave up on protesting.
It seemed to be a favored tactic of his. Just keep arguing and pushing until he wore his opponent out. They were going to need to have a talk about that at some point, considering Cheyenne didn’t imagine her patience with that particular quirk would last for very long.
Regardless, that was how Cheyenne found herself sitting in the passenger seat of Harry’s car as Lorraine drove towards the clinic. Cheyenne stared fixedly out the window, pretending with all of her might that the car was simply driving itself and that she didn’t have company.
On the whole, it worked well enough. Cheyenne was fairly sure Lorraine didn’t want to be there any more than Cheyenne wanted her there. It was, at last, something they had in common, but it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing people bonded over, so Cheyenne was content to just let things remain awkward.
Just as expected, her appointment was nothing exciting, other than receiving a list of gentle exercises she could do to help ease the aches and pains. It wasn’t until they were back in the car and pulling away from the curb that Lorraine finally spoke.
“Aren’t you supposed to call Mr. Carmichael and let him know how the appointment went?”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes and pulled her cellphone out of her pocket. It wasn’t as if she had forgotten; she just needed slightly more than half a minute to actually do so.
Even with her annoyance at Harry, talking to him on the phone was still a bright point that afternoon, and for a moment she managed to forget that she wasn’t alone in the car. He always got so enthusiastic and excited to hear any news about his ‘three little bears.’ Cheyenne was almost convinced that one of them was going to wind up named Goldilocks, regardless of the fact that it was unlikely that any of them would be blond.
He asked all of his usual questions, and Cheyenne gave all of her usual answers, and then he gushed for a few more moments with an almost boyish level of excitement, so by the time Cheyenne hung up, there was a smile on her face that she hadn’t even noticed at first.
The car was stopped at a red light, and Cheyenne glanced over at Lorraine just in time to catch her staring. For a split second, she looked sad, until she realized she had been spotted, and it shifted to irritation for a heartbeat, before her expression smoothed over, back to her standard gentle neutrality.
Cheyenne wasn’t sure what that look meant. She was fairly sure, though, that it was nothing good, and it was certainly food for thought.