No wonder he’d wanted an explanation. No wonder he’d been so furious. What they’d told him had undermined the entire foundation of the love that they’d once shared.
Just like his lack of response in her time of need had done to her. And Ellie found her knees buckling as she suddenly understood that that had probably not been his decision, either.
She looked at Gabe, saw the way the sunlight teased out a hint of softness in his face, made her see hints of his younger self inside. She should feel relief, she thought, relief that what she’d believed all of this time wasn’t true.
But all she felt was dead. Cold, empty inside a shell of ice. For a moment she considered just leaving it be, because really, what was the point of hurting him needlessly? And oh, how it hurt, even now.
But he had a right to know. And though each word scraped her throat, grated it raw and left her bleeding, she forced the hollow words from the empty body that she’d become.
“I didn’t try to kill myself. I was having a baby.”
Chapter Five
Watching the shock on Gabe’s face made Ellie wish she could take the words back. What good could it possibly do now, anyway?
But it was too late. It seemed like it was always too late, at least for them.
“What?” Finding his voice, Gabe roared the single word. Ellie found herself retreating completely into herself, watching the emotions run riot over Gabe’s face as though through a thick pane of glass. “I… what… how?”
“Pretty sure you know the answer to that one.” Hugging her arms to her chest, Ellie felt a chill, wished for her sweater, but couldn’t move. Just like when her period had been late, and she’d stolen the pregnancy test from the drugstore, peeing on the stick in the cramped stall of Nina’s Diner.
They’d been careful, always. But careful wasn’t always enough. If they’d been older, had had a chance to mature, to have an adult relationship, she might have thought that that baby had simply been meant to be.
But she’d stopped believing in fate a long time ago.
Gabe still gawked at her. The disbelief, the confusion… it made grief stab through her, a wickedly sharp blade through her gut.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Having gone through a myriad of emotions, Gabe seemed to settle on anger. That, Ellie understood. In the face of confusion, anger was the easiest to use as a shield, bold and bright enough to burn reality away. “I… you should have told me.”
“I’d intended to.” Her voice displayed a calm that she didn’t even remotely feel. “But I’d just found out, myself. I’d stolen a pregnancy test from the drugstore.”
“Oh, no.” She watched Gabe suck in a breath, smiled grimly.
“Yep. Your dad caught up with me at Nina’s. Demanded I return what I’d taken. I was so stunned, I went right ahead and handed him the test. It was positive.”
Gabe shook his head, slowly at first, then faster, in full out denial. Ellie could well remember the feeling.
“But… you could have called. Something.” His hands fisted at his sides. Ellie felt like he was squeezing her heart in one of them.
“Your dad marched me straight back to Estelle’s. He showed her the test, told her his son wasn’t taking responsibility for a child that probably wasn’t his, anyway. That I was trash, and not worth ruining your life over.” The ice inside of her cracked right down the middle, giving way to a single, hot tear, which overflowed, scalding the skin of her cheek.
She’d never told this to anyone. She didn’t even like to remember it herself.
“But… of course it was mine.” Bewildered, Gabe ran a hand through his hair, paced one way, then back the other, trying to assimilate. “Why would he say that?”
“Oh, he knew.” Ellie smiled grimly. “But here, we’d given him the perfect opportunity to keep us apart.”
Rage surged through her, fresh and new at the injustice of it all.
“But… why did you go? I would have known it was… ours.” Stilling his pacing, right in front of her, Gabe reached out for her elbows, snatching his fingers away before he could hold her.
She ached for the touch.
“That wasn’t your dad’s fault. I think he would have been happy enough to let be ruined. To plant seeds in your mind that maybe I’d been unfaithful.” She’d been the one to take his virginity, after all, not the other way around. She’d earned her label as wild.
“Estelle… it was the last straw for her. She was done. She took my phone, my computer. Threw this tiny little suitcase on the bed and told me I could keep whatever I could fit in it. That night she dropped me off in front of a centre for unwed mothers in New Mexico. I had no money, nothing to contact you with. And then when I did…”
“You saw that I hadn’t contacted you.” The raw pain in Gabe’s voice was plain.
“Right. And then… I still had to try. I e-mailed. I called. I wrote letters. And after a while… I just knew you weren’t coming.” A second tear slid down her cheek. Damn it. Why did this pain never end?
“I never got any e-mails. Any letters. My dad. My mom, too, I guess.” Gabe’s eyes searched her face. “I… wow.”
Abruptly he turned, resumed his pacing. As his steps took him away, even knowing that he’d turn right back around, Ellie felt the echo of loss.
Steeling herself, she closed her eyes. She knew just what was coming.
She knew he’d circled back to her because she felt the heat radiating off of his skin. It wasn’t enough to warm her.
“Did you…” he hesitated, and Ellie blanched. “Did you have the baby?”
This… this was where the pain came. This was the memory she could never freeze out, never burn away with the white heat of anger.
She swallowed, but nearly choked on the lump in her throat.
“Yes,” she finally managed, her voice not even sounding like her own. “Yes, I had him.”
“Him?” The wonder that that one little word held made Ellie’s entire body clench. She tried to form the words, to cut him off before the potential for pain could grow any wider, but her mouth was dry, cottony, unable to form words.
Gabe huffed with impatience as she lifted her water glass to her lips, sipped, let the moisture pool on her tongue. “Ellie. Talk to me. We… what happened to him? Does he… does he know about me?”
If Gabe had been disgusted, if he had agreed that he might not be the father, if he had shown terror at the thought of a child that was part him, part her might be wandering around in the world, it would have been so much easier.
The hint of excitement, of disbelief that he showed instead… it was a new wound sliced right over top of the scar that never quite healed. Ellie parted her lips, and was barely able to force any words out.
“Yes. Him.” Her grief, her rage was too big for tears. It had been then, too. She’d stayed awake for days, staring at the wall, packed so tightly with grief she was numb.
And when the first shard of ice thawed, her entire being had cracked.
“Did you… was he adopted?” Gabe’s words were stilted, but the excitement she could sense beneath almost killed her.
“No.” Ellie swore she could feel her very soul tremble, and though she tried to control it, she found her arms wrapped tightly around her torso, rocking herself back and forth in search of some kind of comfort.
She knew, though, she knew only too well that the comfort she needed never came.
The blood drained from Gabe’s face, and in that second she knew that he understood. Still, she owed him the words.
“He died.” She closed her eyes; she didn’t want to see his reaction. For so long this pain had been hers alone, and sharing it now made it feel heavier rather than halved, as it should have been.
The sound of footsteps made her eyes fly open, and she watched helplessly as Gabe strode toward the door that would take him back downstairs, back out of the shop.
No, not helpless. Never again.
But it still hurt, to watch him walk away.
And when he stopped, pressed his forehead to the worn wood, she was foolishly relieved.
Finally he turned around. Ellie wrapped herself in ice once again, eyeing him dully.
“I don’t know what to say.” He finally admitted, and disappointment drove the knife in deeper.
That was it? That was all he had?
Inhaling deeply, she reached for the cruelly edged anger that was never all that far away for her. If she paused for a moment, she knew she’d think about how it wasn’t fair to expect the same level of grief that she felt. He’d only just found out that their baby boy had even existed.
He’d never seen the tiny flutter of a heartbeat on an ultrasound. He’d never felt those little feet kicking against her ribcage, the discomfort almost a wonder.
He hadn’t been there that awful day, when she’d gone to the hospital, two days overdue and equal parts thrilled and terrified that she was due to be induced.
He hadn’t felt the disbelief, the shock when the doctor had sadly informed her that the baby had died in her womb.
He hadn’t been forced through the mind shattering pain of childbirth, knowing that there would be no outraged howls as their son sucked his first breath into those tiny lungs.
And he hadn’t held that small, impossibly still form to his chest. Hadn’t looked at exquisite lips gone ruby red from lack of oxygen, or tufts of hair as dark as his own, or pea sized little toes that had curled inward slightly, as if he’d been fighting to get out.
He hadn’t wondered what he’d done, how he’d made a child die inside of his body. Hadn’t felt his breasts swell with milk that would go unused.
He hadn’t singlehandedly pulled himself out of the mire of depression and self- destruction single-handedly because time continues to march on.
“I want you to go now.” Ellie felt herself begin to shake. Whether it was because Gabe’s response lacked the intensity of everything she herself still carried inside of her, or because telling him had opened that wound again…
She couldn’t look at him anymore. He would forever be a reminder of that little life that had been lost.
And she was angry. So angry. He hadn’t had to go through all of that pain. And she hated him for it, much the same way she’d once hated other mothers for having healthy, living children.
“Ellie.” Gabe’e expression was unreadable. Probably he wanted to offer her some comfort.
But even though it hadn’t been his fault that he’d stayed away… it was still too little, too late.
“Go.” Turning, she pressed her hands to her temples, tried to will away her pain. She heard him step closer, hesitate, and then walk toward the door, the echo of his booted steps quieting the further away he got.
Numbly, she threw the deadbolt for the upstairs door, then made her way to the bathroom that had once been the only place she’d had any privacy at all. Turning the hot water on full, she added just a trickle of cold, and then in a fit of pique, tossed in a handful of the bath salts that smelled of the slightly musty talcum powder and perfume scent that Ellie would forever associate with Estelle.
She watched the water slosh against the stark white enamel of the basin, watched the steam curl around her. Suffocating her with memories.
Suddenly unable to breath, she pulled the plug on the tub she hadn’t even set foot in, turned off the water, pushed out of the bathroom and to the same window where she’d seen Gabe last night.
This time, there was no one standing there.
As she’d been for so long, she was alone. And Ellie knew that she’d made a horrible error in coming back to Florence. Everything that made her who she was now… it didn’t exist within this town’s limits. Or at the very least, was buried beneath memory and expectation.
She needed to sell this shop, this apartment, and get the hell back to Colorado. Back to her life.
And she was never, ever coming back.
Chapter Six
Being sheriff meant that work had to go on, even though Gabe was much more inclined to go buy a bottle of whiskey and retreat into the silence of his apartment.
But it was a good distraction. Kept his mind occupied, even though his body was almost buzzing, a constant reminder that all was not right with his world. He’d never been one to procrastinate, preferring to take care of problems as they came. But this...
It wasn’t exactly a problem, at least not anymore. But Ellie’s revelation had left him feeling utterly helpless.
A cop down to the bone, he wanted action. Wanted some way to right the wrongs that had been done, not just to Ellie, but to them both. When he thought of what she’d gone through, by herself...
He’d been denied the chance to be a part of that. And a large part of him wanted to blame her, from force of habit—after all, it had been a lot of years since this had all happened. Surely sometime in the last decade, once she’d had more resources, she could have found some way to tell him.
But unless no trace of the girl he’d known remained inside of her, telling him after the fact wouldn’t have been an option. Gabe had never seen Ellie as the trash that his father had called her, but he was all too familiar with her pride.
After making his rounds, and issuing far more tickets for minor violations than was his habit, he slammed open the door to the station with more force than was necessary. Suz jumped, her chair tilting back at a dangerous angle. Once she’d righted herself, she settled herself back in, the stiffness of her spine and glare on her face enough to tell Gabe that he’d stepped in it.
Suz was a redhead too, though her hair was the shade of garden carrots rather than the strawberry kissed blonde of Ellie’s. But between the red locks and the look on her face, his dispatcher only served to drive Gabe’s thoughts right back to Ellie.
He glowered himself and pulled the crumpled pile of ticket carbons from his pocket, placing them on Suz’s desk.
“Sorry.” He muttered. There was no need to take his foul mood out on her. Problem was, he had nowhere to channel all of the feelings. Though it was hard to change the beliefs of a decade, this was in no way Ellie’s fault. Estelle was dead. That left Ed.
He wasn’t ready to speak to his father yet. Once, he’d been envious of the way that Ellie had been able to come and go, Estelle not being invested enough in her granddaughter to worry about things like curfews, though he’d understood even then that it was better to have parents who cared.
Somewhere deep down—way deep down at the moment—Gabe knew that his dad had done what he’d done because, to him, it had been the only way to protect his son’s future. And there was no doubt in his mind that to this day, his father stood by his decision—after all, hadn’t he sat in this chair this very morning an told Gabe that he owed him?
But Ellie hadn’t run away. She’d never left him. And she’d given birth to their child.
Rather than protecting him, his father had betrayed him in the worst possible way.
Shaking his head to clear it of his thoughts, Gabe looked at Suz, who was flipping through the stack of carbons with what appeared to be sheer disbelief. She waved one at him, then crumpled it up in her fist.
“Not picking up dog poop? Are you serious?” Shaking her head, Suz threw the balled up ticket into the wastebasket. “For a repeat doody offender, sure. But Mr. Cann? He’s about a hundred years old. He probably couldn’t even see it with those cataracts of his. You’re not giving him a ticket for forty dollars. He’s on a fixed income.”
Irritation was a thousand tiny needles sliding beneath his skin at once. “I’m sorry, but who’s wearing the pointy star on their shirt?” His voice was mild. He hated pulling rank, believing that everyone who worked in the station had a vital purpose, right down to Hallie Sinclair, who came in and mopped things out twice a week.
Suz had known him too long to take offense. “Heard you had some coffee at Nina’s last night. With Ellie Kendrick.”
Gabe stiffened, though why he was surprised, he didn’t know. That was how word travelled out
here… mouth to mouth, and fast as a desert storm.
But he wouldn’t let their secret become town gossip. Not ever. Nothing would hurt Ellie more. And though it was a strange sensation after so many years of bitterness directed her way, he couldn’t help the stab of protectiveness.
“She’s back to sort out Estelle’s affairs, I believe.” This was the truth. But the sudden notion of watching her walk back out of town… now that he knew what he did…
It didn’t sit well with him.
Settling back in her chair, Suz tapped a pen on her desk, over and over and over until Gabe ground his teeth together at the sound, which made the woman grin wryly.
“Heard she had a meeting with Billy Huggins today.” She watched her boss intently, searching, Gabe knew, for some clue about how he was feeling.
“And how did you hear that?” Not wanting to show Suz—or anyone—how interested he was in all things Ellie, he made a show of casually making his way to the coffee pot and, finding it empty, getting out a filter and a the tin of grounds for a fresh batch.
“Billy told Alice at the diner when he stopped in for lunch. Said he told her she needs to renovate at least the apartment to sell the place, but that he’s not so sure even that will help in this market.”
Gabe knew that Suz’s eyes were on him, studying him, as he measured coffee grounds into the basket.
“So she’s going to renovate? Is she hiring someone, or will she be staying?” Only an idiot wouldn’t hear the hopeful note in Gabe’s voice. But he couldn’t deny that hope was exactly what he was feeling.
There had been other women in his life. He’d dated them, bedded them, even come close to love with one of them. But every single one had been pale in comparison to the vibrant color of Ellie Kendrick.
Gabe turned to find Suz looking at him with a smug expression. He frowned and turned back to the coffee, which oh-so-fascinatingly brewing a pot.
“Apparently she indicated that she couldn’t afford it. She left without listing the place, which means she hasn’t decided yet.” Suz nodded, turning her attention back to the stack of carbons. “Stuck between a rock and a hard place, poor thing. Wouldn’t be surprised if she just bailed, let someone else deal with it. Always was the irresponsible type.”
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