DARCY
Taking a walk to clear my head always sounded like a good idea in theory. The reality was it was freezing, and the only thing I was clearing was my sinuses with the way my nose wouldn’t stop running. The wind was an endless torrent against my face, snowflakes clinging to my eyelashes as I charged ahead, sticking to the snowy parts of the road for better traction.
Lights suddenly illuminated the road in front of me and I heard Garrett’s truck rumbling down the road, but I didn’t slow down. It wasn’t that I was mad at him, he hadn’t done or said anything, but that was kind of the point wasn’t it? He hadn’t congratulated me either. I didn’t expect them to leap for joy, it was the whole reason I’d wanted Archer there for support, but something about anticipating their disappointment and actuallyexperiencing it were two different things. It would’ve been nice to have been proved wrong.
I was fast, but I couldn’t out walk a truck, even if said truck wasn’t going very fast at all. Red paint crept into my peripheral, and I continued trudging forward, the snow crunching beneath my shoes until I heard the window roll down, and a voice that was distinctly not Garrett’s call out.
“Darcy!”
Archer.
I came to a halt, and turned to face him. Sure enough, Archer sat behind the steering wheel of Garrett’s truck. What the hell did I miss in the five minutes I’d been gone?
“Did you steal Garrett’s truck?”
He chuckled. “No, believe it or not, he let me take it. Please get in, it’s fucking cold outside.”
His expression said he expected me to fight the request, but I didn’t. Itwascold out, and I wasn’t out here throwing a tantrum to prove some sort of point. I’d just needed some space, and the one thing there was never enough of in the Adler house was space.
Opening the passenger door, I climbed up onto the bench seat, the leather cool, but warm compared to my wind-chilled butt. I held my numb fingers up in front of the vents, and glanced over at Archer who was studying me intently.
“Thank you for coming to get me.”
“Of course.” He smiled, then turned us around and started to drive the short distance back to my parents’. “Want to talk about it?”
I sighed. “It’s silly. I don’t know why I’m this upset—it went almost exactly how I thought it would, with the exception of Linnea spilling the beans.”
“And how do you think it went?”
My eyebrows knitted together. What kind of question was that? He was there, he knew exactly how it went. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged, pulling back into my parents’ house, and throwing the truck in park. When he turned toward me, he rested an arm on the steering wheel. “I’m merely trying to understand what happened that set you off.”
I scowled, not able to keep the bite out of my words. “You mean besides none of them saying anything remotely congratulatory to me?”
“Yeah, besides that.” He brushed my attitude off as if it was a speck of dirt on his shirt, or an annoying fly buzzing around his head.
“They were shocked, like I knew they’d be, like theyshouldbe. It was a shock for me too.” I studied my hands in my lap. “But they weren’t shocked in the oh-my-gosh-you’re-pregnant way, they were shocked in the I-can’t-believe-Darcy-is-pregnant way. Their questions felt like they think I’m the last person who should be a mom.”
Archer nodded at that, but waited me out, as if he knew I had more to say.
“My whole life I felt like the child who couldn’t do anything right. Not necessarily wrong, but different, and maybe it’s my middle child showing, but being different always felt inferior.”
“How so?” he asked.
It felt absurd, sitting here talking with him about this, when his traumas wereactualtrauma. Mine were just wounded self-worth and pride. I thought for a while, then settled on an example to give him. “Okay, well, for instance, there was this one time Linnea and I had both drawn cats, but hers was black and brown with white paws, and mine was green with blue stripes like lightning. My mom complimented Linnea on how life-like hers was, how talented she was, but when she saw mine, I gotacool. To be fair, I think she said it wasvery cool, but still. It sounds so stupid when I say it out loud, and maybe it is, but it’s always been little things like that, and at some point I started to feel less than. Then both my siblings got these incredible jobs helping people, and I . . .” I trailed off. Verbalizing it all felt so childish, like I should be over this by now, yet I wasn’t.
He prodded gently. “You what?”
“I guess tonight they made me feel like I screwed up by not telling them—like I’m not someone who should be allowed to change her mind about wanting children. Like because I went about having children differently than they did, I somehow did it wrong.”
My words hung in the cab between us for a minute.
“Do you actually believe they think those things about you?”
“Yes,” I said stubbornly before groaning. “No. I don’t know. I know they love me, it just always felt different from how they love Garrett and Linnea. Not like they loved them more, but like they loved them in the same way, but me in another.”
“You want to know what I think?” There was an intensity in his eyes that had me trapped, his voice quiet with sincerity.
