Page 22 of A Baby for the Mountain Man
Whatever. If he wants to buy a couple of novelty baby clothes, that’s fine.
He carries the bag for me out of the store. He gives me plenty of space, while somehow staying close enough that it’s almost hovering. We walk down the street until we reach a small park. It’s the middle of the day, so it’s mostly empty, except for a few parents and their children who are too young to be in school.
We stand against a railing, facing the park instead of each other. I fold my arms across my chest.
“Are you cold?” he asks.
I shake my head. “What did you want to talk about?”
He hesitates, and for a moment I think he might shrug out of his coat to drape it over my shoulders. It would be a waste if he did. Even with how impromptu my trip north was, I did take the time to come properly dressed for the late February elements.
With a sigh, Cliff turns his stare back to the park. Long seconds pass. Is he waiting for me to speak again? He’s the one who said he wanted to talk.
I cast a sidelong glance at his face, and my heart hitches. The expression on it—clearly stricken—reaches inside of me, past all of my complicated feelings toward him.
Complicated, because as mad as I am at him right now, I still love him.
“Did you know I was engaged?”
I start then. “You were?”
He nods slowly. “A little more than five years ago.”
Five years ago. When he abruptly quit his job and bought a cabin about as far away as he could get from his life in Seattle.
“Liv and I had been dating for about six months when she told me she was pregnant.”
He pauses when I suck in a breath, but I don’t say anything. I need him to finish telling me what he’s started, even if the pain flowing out of him starts to seep into me.
“I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure she was the person I wanted to spend my life with. I liked her. Cared about her. I even loved her in a way.”
I nod, even as his words sear new wounds inside of me. Of course, he’s been in love before. Most people don’t live almost forty years of their life without having been in love once.
It’s not fair for me to expect him to never have been in love with anyone else, just because I’ve been pining for him all these years.
He shifts from one foot to the other. “When she told me she was pregnant, I was excited. My dad had died a few months earlier. It hit me hard. But hearing that I was going to be a father seemed like a way to have a connection with him, even though he was gone. You get that, right?”
I moisten my lips. “I do.”
It’s part of the reason I’ve always wanted to have a family of my own. I hardly have any memories of my parents. My grandma is the only family I remember having for most of my life. But having a baby—having a family of my own—seemed like a way to have a link to them.
I’m thinking about all of this when it suddenly hits me: Cliff doesn’t have any children. Or, if he does, he’s somehow managed to keep them a secret all of these years.
He reads the question in my eyes. “She lied. She wasn’t pregnant.”
“Was it a false alarm?”
“She lied,” he repeats. “I found out when I overheard her talking to one of her friends about it. Apparently, she figured she’d fake it until we were married and then fake a miscarriage.”
The ache in my heart swells even more until I’m sure it’s going to shatter into a million pieces. How could someone do that? First, lying and getting someone’s hopes up just so they could get married and then faking one of the most traumatic experiences a person can have.
It’s so awful I can’t even find a word for it.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“Yeah, well.” He lifts his shoulder as if to say it was no big deal.
We both know that isn’t true. It was a big deal. One so big, he felt the need to quit the life he was living and start over. One so big it made him decide he never wanted to get married or have kids.