Page 80 of Just (Fake) Married
“Yeah, I do,” he said with a sigh. “Lilly is gone and she was the mother of my children.”
“You’re not buried with her,” I said, which was seriously the wrong thing to say. He glared at me the way he’d glared at me when we were kids and I left his bike out in the rain.
“Remember, brother. Your marriage is fake. So you don’t know shit about shit when it comes to love.”
That felt particularly harsh, but I couldn’t say he was wrong.
Zoe came running back into the study with her pink hat on her head and one arm in her coat, while she re-situated her elephant. “You wanna come with us?”
“I can’t, sweetie,” I said, as I held up her coat so she could get her other arm into the sleeve. “I’ve got to go be a doctor in town today.”
She nodded and reached up to take Carter’s hand. “You were a good doctor. I’m all better now. Let’s go, Daddy.”
I laughed and watched the two of them leave.
I want children.
It hit me like a bolt inside my chest. But it was true. Just like I’d understood the same thing about Harmony that day in the courtroom, I understood it about myself, too.
I wanted little ones.
But Harmony and I wanting the same thing…didn’t make our fake relationship any more real.
The clinic was criminally understaffedby very nice people.
Dr. Blackfeather was the kind of doctor I liked. No nonsense. She wasn’t above anything and there was no game-playing with her. Her family was part of the Eastern Shoshone tribe from over in Wind River and she worked on the reservation three days a week and at the clinic two days.
She’d recruited another doctor from the Crow Nation as a pediatrician. But it was just the two of them and two more LPNs, who lived over in Big Horn and rotated in for shifts to try and fill the cracks.
“Let me take you on a tour,” Dr. Blackfeather said, after explaining her staffing issues.
The building was incredible and pristine. One surgery. Two well-supplied trauma rooms. Two offices. A reception area anda nursing station. I opened a drawer in the trauma room and found intubation sets and syringes.
“You intubate a lot?”
“Not really, but the helicopter has picked up a few trauma cases when the rodeo is in town. Mostly we get broken bones, burst appendixes, heart attacks and babies.”
“That covers a lot of ground,” I said, shutting the drawer and following her out into a hallway covered in thank you cards and pictures of new babies.
“We’ve tried everything,” she said. “To get more funding, we’ve tried to hire more people, offer better hours. We’ve even offered free housing, but the town just isn’t bringing in new people. Which is why, when I heard you were moving back to town…”
“I’m not,” he said quickly, too quickly. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, are you and Harmony moving back to Seattle then?” She smiled. “I never thought I’d see Harmony Calloway move away from the Gulch?”
“We…ah…haven’t figured it out yet,” I lied. I was going to have to get better at lying. I was going to undo all the good work Harmony had done over the past few weeks crafting our believable love story. “We’re sticking around here until after the festival and then we’ll make our plans.”
“I guess this has been a whirlwind, hasn’t it?” she asked, her eyes narrowed like she didn’t totally believe me, and for a second I almost gave up the whole charade. This was a woman of science, she wasn’t going to buy this bullshit of love saving the town.
“It really has,” I said.
“Anyway,” she said, slapping her hand on my shoulder. “Having the McGraws and Calloways committed again is good for the festival. If it’s good for the festival, it’s good for the town. I can’t believe it matters, but the truth is, winning back that blueribbon could really change things around here. And the economy matters if I’m going to convince talented doctors and nurses to come to Last Hope Gulch.”
Great. Now the clinic was riding on this fake marriage too.
NINETEEN
HARMONY
