My skin burned, my muscles twisted, and before I could stop it, my black bear forced me into a shift—unstoppable, primal, and intent on the hunt.
11/
so what you’re saying is that you’ve basically ruined my life
holly
Mates! Mates! Mates! The new voice continued to growl inside of me. But…
No. I had to find my coat. Find my keys! Get out of this town!
One moment, I was in ecstasy, and the next, I was running blindly up the trail to Ayaska Village, searching for the place where I’d veered into the forest. Trying to escape the nightmare I’d left behind in that jail cell.
I’d barely been able to run the night before, but I was weirdly stronger now. My Hokas slapped against the snow-packed ground, each step bounding me farther up the white road. I only wore a shirt and flannel that smelled of maple, but the below-freezing weather didn’t slow me down. The cold didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting away.
Away from the humiliation.You’ve ruined my life!
Away from that animatronic Mountie.
There—there it was! The motorcycle lying in the road, marking the spot where I’d run into the forest earlier. I cut right again, and branches clawed at my arms as I stumbled through the trees. Their sharp scrapes felt like physical manifestations of the words battering my mind.
You’ve ruined my life!
The Mountie’s accusation whirred like an electric drill into my brain, unlocking memories I’d spent over a year trying to bury.
So what you’re saying is that you’ve basically ruined my life.
Corey had spat the words at me like venom.
At first, I hadn’t blamed him for his anger. After using his dual visa to move to Canada and getting married, he’d wanted to start a family when I was twenty-eight, but I’d insisted we wait. Corey called himself a “muralisto”—his term for pursuing a career as a muralist—and I respected his art. But as his newly emigrated wife, it didn’t feel like a strong foundation to build a family on with me as the most likely breadwinner.
It felt reasonable at the time to wait until I’d established a robust client list for my specialized homebirth midwife practice and a strong enough reputation to be brought on for shifts at my partner hospital when business was slow. But I was thirty by the time I felt ready to go off birth control, and he was already bitter.
After nearly a year of trying, we finally got pregnant—only for it to end two weeks later in miscarriage. That’s when I decided to consult a fertility specialist, who suggested I address the fibroids I’d been ignoring for years.
When I told Corey I’d most likely need surgery for the fibroids that were making conception difficult, his reaction was devastating. “So what you’re saying is you’ve got a medical condition that you didn’t tell me about? And that’s why we’ve been having so much trouble getting pregnant?”
I’d tried to explain, “Honestly, I’ve been living with painful, monster periods because of fibroids since my teens. It never occurred to me to talk about it with anyone, especially you. They’re not exactly sexy. And I didn’t know they’d make getting pregnant so hard! I thought I could just deal with it until the doctor suggested surgery.”
“How could you not know?” he retorted. “You’re a midwife! You do this for a living.”
“I deliver babies,” I argued, my voice breaking. “I don’t help women conceive them. That’s a completely different field of medicine.”
Corey just shook his head, his eyes filling with tears. “But you knew about the fibroids, and you withheld them from me.” He threw himself down on the couch with a dramatic sigh. “You’ve basically ruined my life!”
“No, Corey, that’s not it at all,” I assured him, desperate to explain my side of things. But nothing I said mattered.
By the time I had the fibroids removed and we tried IVF, I was thirty-three. And Corey had already emotionally checked out.
He left after my second miscarriage. Quietly, at first. He was eager to move on with his new girlfriend and I was too tired to fight for the marriage he clearly no longer wanted. We promised to let each other go without a fuss.
But his version of a no-fuss divorce had turned into a courtroom spectacle when his lawyer painted me as deceitful, a woman who’d intentionally wasted years of her husband’s life.
“My client was clear about wanting children, but she knowingly hid her condition from him, costing him precious years.”
The judge had believed his slick lawyer, and Corey smirked as the gavel fell. Then he’d walked out of the courtroom with his new girlfriend. Leaving me behind like trash. Trash I’d suspected no one else would ever want.
Until today.
