Page 20 of The Sweetest Chirp

“Didn’t mean for you not to,” he snarks back, glaring at me. He thinks I’m frustrating?

“Your face is frustrating.”

“Back atcha.”

My phone sounds, and I look down. “Arwen’s meds are ready. I’m going to run down and ask Ruby to go get them.”

He whips his head around to me. “Let me call you back,” he says to whoever he is speaking to. “Do you have a car?”

I swallow hard. “I do.”

“Give me the keys and the address. I’ll go get them.” I hesitate as he stands, tucking his phone into his pocket. “Do I need her insurance card?”

I open my drawer and pull out my keys to give myself time to think of the best way to answer that. As he comes to stand beside me, he holds out his hand, and I drop the keys into it. “You take a left out of the diner, and it’s the pharmacy in the Walmart.”

He hikes a brow. “There is a Walmart here?”

I shoot him a deadpan expression. “Yes, and it’s self-pay.”

His eyes burn into mine. “Self-pay? You don’t have insurance for her?”

“No,” I answer, meeting his gaze. “I pay out of pocket.”

“Why isn’t she on state insurance or something?”

“Because I didn’t want anyone to find me.”

His eyes burn, his face turning red as he breathes heavily. He turns and leaves without another word. Once the door shuts, I try to see through my tears as I search for a different specialist. Why didn’t he yell? When will he lose his temper and let me have it? Why didn’t I recognize how badly I was failing until he showed up? Damn it. When I find a specialist in North Carolina, I push past my fear of re-entering the Carolinas and make an appointment for this week. Just as I set down my phone to check on Arwen, the door opens and Ruby sticks her head in.

I give her a watery grin, and her shoulders fall. “Oh dear. I saw him leaving. Did it go belly-up?”

I shake my head as she comes in and sits where he was sitting when he was stroking Arwen’s back. Her kind blue eyes hold mine as she waits for me to answer. My heart is in my throat. “He went to get Arwen’s antibiotics.”

“Oh, so he’s coming back?”

“Yeah, though, I don’t know what is going to happen.” I wipe away a tear, hating how much I’ve cried since he showed up. I don’t even know how to feel at this moment. I have missed him, but also, he makes me feel like I’m a poor excuse for a mother.

My feelings are the epitome of “It’s complicated.”

“He wants me to go back home with him. Says he refuses to be an absentee father.”

“I didn’t realize he didn’t know.”

The guilt is suffocating me. “Neither do my parents.”

Her brows shoot to her hairline, her eyes searching mine. “They’re alive?”

We never spoke about my parents or my life before I came to the diner. Just that I was pregnant and needed somewhere to go. Ruby didn’t ask questions; she just loved me. “Yeah, and I’m sure they’re out of their minds with worry about me.”

“Oh, Maria?—”

“I know,” I admit, shaking my head. “But I took off because he made me feel like I was nothing. If the one person I loved more than anything thought so little of me, no telling what everyone else thought.”

I also had anxiety about my family or his or Ingrid finding out what had happened at the rink. How he’d spoken to me, what he’d called me. I didn’t want them to know or even assume that of me.

“Who cares what he thought?” she asks, but I press my lips together.

“I did. I wanted to be his world, and I wasn’t good enough.” I take a deep breath, running my fingers along Arwen’s chunky ankle. “I needed a reset, and after a month, I thought I had one. I wasn’t going to let him decide who I was. I’d show him I’m more. But as I was driving home, I got so sick and threw up on the side of the road. I ran to the Walmart and took a pregnancy test in the bathroom. I was pregnant by the man I loved but who thought I was the biggest whore in the world. I had stopped here to think, and you were so kind, when I knew everyone at home wouldn’t be. I would have to fight the father of my child to get him to accept my pregnancy. Our families are so close, and I felt like sides would be taken. He’d hurt me so badly that, when you offered, I stayed.”

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