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But that was much harder recently. Apparently, he had been spotted by some people we went to high school with, running around with a woman and a baby. One person was certain that the woman was his sister, but others weren’t so sure. If it was his sister, she had changed a lot. My memories of Kimberly, or Rose as I knew her, were of a shy girl who kept her hair down and straight and wore hoodies all the time. The description of the tattooed and painfully thin woman with dirty-blonde hair that was running around with Hawk seemed not to match.
Then again, maybe I just didn’t want the description to match. If it was some new woman, then that settled it for me in a way that I needed. Closure. If he had moved on and was married and had a kid now, living his wonderful life in the cabin in the mountain, then good. I could let that go, finally.
I was under no illusion that I wasn’t still feeling complicated and aggravating feelings for Hawk. I always had. The night he stood me up for prom, I’d lain there with my phone in my hand, waiting for him to call. I continued to wait for him for days afterward, needing that explanation. Only Wendy could get through to me, to tell me that it was over and that he wasn’t going to call. He was gone.
Yet, a small part of me, flying in the face of all reason, continued to hold out hope. It continued to believe that maybe one day he would return. And maybe we would see each other, much like we did that day when I was going to go get a burger and literally almost ran into him. We would talk, and he would apologize, and we would try again.
It was ridiculous. I was stupid for even thinking something like that. I just had to deal with the pain every time it came and work through it. But if he had truly moved on, then maybe that would help me get past it.
“I heard he ran into Aiden,” Harleigh said. “They were talking to someone close to where he lived about buying land there. Brett told me about it the other day. Who is he?”
“Just someone who I used to go to school with,” I said, trying to move past it.
“He’s an asshole,” Wendy said, taking a sip of her drink. “Stood Dee up for prom, the jackass.”
“Oh,” Harleigh said. “Weird. Brett said he seemed like a great guy.”
“He can be,” I said. “Hey, how are the girls?”
It was clunky, but it was a segue, and it worked. Harleigh brightened and started gushing about her twins, and I kept the conversation going long enough that I figured Wendy had given up on ragging on Hawk enough to let it go. She was fiercely protective of me and had a bit of a grudge for Hawk since that night. She’d come home early from prom to be with me, and I got the impression she would string him up if she ever saw him.
Conversation slowly transitioned to my sister and her baby. It was difficult to avoid it, since she was right there, bouncing Alice on her knee as she swaddled her. Malia had been talking about her streaming channel, which had made her a minor celebrity. Everyone in town knew she had that channel and was extremely supportive of her. Anyone else walking around downtown with a camera strapped to their chest would probably be the subject of ridicule, but Malia was something of an anomaly.
She was training hard to be able to run a marathon, which was the subject du jour recently, when it wasn’t about her baby or the impending wedding. I tried to smile as everyone gushed about Alice and they talked about the plans for the wedding. As they slid into the giggling, silly conversation that generally happened when women commiserated about wedding plans and new babies, I mentally checked out a bit.
I was struggling with this desire to have my own family. Being alone in the home was part of it, I knew, and I would get used to that in time. Part of it was seeing my sister and how terrific things were for her and being happy for her as well as envious. But part of it was the job too.
The head doctor, Dr. Sutton, was a stern man, though not unkind. He had a very particular way about him and was difficult to please. That wasn’t much of an issue for most people who worked there, since they had been there for decades and had learned his ways and what to expect from him. But I was still so new, even though I had been there about a year. I felt like I was learning something new that I was doing wrong every day.
