Chapter 14: Disowning & Devotion
The fluorescent hum in the peach-colored room was the only sound for a long time. Cass stared at the ceiling, the word married bouncing around the hollows of her skull. The tiny, blinking heartbeat still echoed in her ears, a second rhythm beneath the hospital’s mechanical pulse. She could feel the slow, warm seep of blood onto the pad between her legs, a grim reminder that none of this was theoretical.
Wade was still on his knees, his forehead pressed against the back of her hand, the one with the IV taped to it. His breathing was ragged, as if he’d run a mile. She could feel the faint tremor in his shoulders.
“Wade,” she whispered. Her voice was sandpaper.
He didn’t lift his head. “They’re not coming back. Not for you. Not after that.” He said it like it was a fact of nature, like the sun setting. “You heard him. You’re dead to him.”
“I know.” And she did. The finality in her father’s voice had been colder than the Lubbock ground. She was cut loose, but not free. Just adrift.
“This room costs money,” Wade said, his voice muffled against her skin. “The blood they might have to give you costs money. A baby… costs money.” He finally looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, but dry, focused with a terrifying intensity. “I have none. Not really. But I have the deed. My uncle’s place. It’s been sitting empty since he died. It’s forty acres of scrub and cedar break, and a house that needs everything. But it’s got a roof. It’s got a well. It’s got a county road number instead of a McAllister address.”
He was talking too fast, laying out a blueprint for a life she’d never seen. “You can’t go back there, Cass. You can’t be under his roof, not like this. He’ll… I won’t let him near you.” A dark, possessive fury flickered in his gaze. “Marry me. Tomorrow. The judge in town owes my uncle a favor. He’ll do it. Then it’s my name on all the paperwork. My insurance, once I get some. My responsibility. He can’t touch you.”
It was the least romantic proposal in the history of the world. It was a logistical maneuver, a strategic retreat. It was also the only lifeline she could see in the dark water.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, the tears coming again, hot and silent. “It’s not your problem.”
“The hell it isn’t.” The words cracked out, sharp. He stood up suddenly, his knees popping, and began to pace the small space between the bed and the window. Two steps, turn. Two steps, turn. “I was there too, remember? In the back of that truck. That’s my kid. That makes it my problem. Our problem.” He stopped, facing her. “And I’m not your father. I don’t throw away what’s mine.”
What’s mine. The words should have felt suffocating. Instead, they felt like the only solid ground.
“What about… everything else?” she asked, so softly he leaned in to hear. “What about you and me? We fight. We don’t know each other. Not like that.”
A ghost of his old, wry smirk touched his mouth. “We know each other enough. I know you’ve got a temper worse than mine and a smart mouth that gets you in trouble. You know I work too much and don’t talk enough. We’ll figure out the rest.” He came back to the bed, but didn’t kneel. He just looked down at her, his hat in his hands, twisting the brim. “It doesn’t have to be a love story, Cass. It just has to be a story where we both get out alive.”
The door swung open and a nurse bustled in, her cheerfulness a violent intrusion. “Time to check your vitals, hon. And this pad.” She glanced at Wade. “Sir, you might want to step out for a few minutes.”
Wade nodded, his eyes never leaving Cass’s. He leaned down, and for a second she thought he might kiss her. He didn’t. He put his lips close to her ear, his stubble grazing her cheek. His voice was a low, rough promise. “Just say yes.”
Then he was gone, the door sighing shut behind him.
The next hour was a blur of beeping machines, cold speculums, and the rustle of sanitary pads. The bleeding had slowed, the nurse said. That was good. Cass floated through it, detached. Her mind was a thousand miles away, in a dusty house on forty acres of scrub.
When Wade returned, he had two styrofoam cups of terrible coffee and a brown paper bag. “Got you some crackers,” he said, setting them on the rolling table. He looked exhausted, older than his thirty-some years.
“Did you mean it?” she asked, not touching the food. “About tomorrow?”
“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
“What about the farm? My dad… he relies on you.”
“He relies on cheap labor,” Wade corrected, his voice flat. “He’ll find more. I gave him my notice when I went to get my truck from your place.”
“You what?”
“Had to get the deed. Your mom was on the porch, crying. Your dad was on the phone, yelling at someone about pressing charges against Jeremy for public disturbance, trying to save face.” Wade’s expression was grim. “I told him I was quitting. He called me a traitorous son of a bitch. Said I’d never work in this county again.” He shrugged. “I own land in the next county over. So it doesn’t matter.”
It was all happening so fast. The world was being dismantled and reassembled in the space of an afternoon.
“The doctor says if the bleeding stays stopped, I can go home tomorrow afternoon,” Cass said, testing the word. Home. It had no shape anymore.
“Good.” Wade pulled the room’s single, ugly orange chair closer to the bed and sat, stretching his long legs out. He took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair. “I’ll go see the judge first thing. Get the license. We’ll need a witness. Maybe Max.”
“Max is eighteen.”
“He’s family. He’ll do it.”
Cass picked at the edge of the stiff blanket. The silence between them wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t hostile. It was the quiet of two people staring at the same steep cliff, deciding to jump together.
“Wade?” she said, after a long while.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For not… running.”
He looked at her then, really looked, and the guarded wall in his eyes came down just a fraction. She saw the fear there, same as hers. The sheer, staggering weight of what they were about to do. “Nowhere to run to, Cass,” he said quietly. “Might as well run forward.”
He stayed as evening deepened into night, a silent sentinel in the orange chair. He didn’t try to hold her hand again. He just was there. A presence. When she finally drifted into a thin, medication-haunted sleep, her last sight was of him, his head leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed, the fluorescent light painting harsh shadows across the planes of his face.
She dreamed of blinking lights and empty houses.
Morning came with pale light through the blinds and a different nurse, who declared the bleeding “minimal.” Dr. Evans arrived, looking marginally less tired. “You’re stable. I’m discharging you with strict instructions. Bed rest. Nothing heavier than a paperback book. Follow up with the clinic in Haskell County next week.” He eyed Wade. “You understand the protocol? She is not to be on her feet. At all.”
“I understand,” Wade said, his voice leaving no room for argument.
The discharge process took forever. Finally, they wheeled her to the hospital’s main entrance in a chair, a ridiculous formality. Wade’s old pickup was idling at the curb, the engine knocking. The December air was a physical shock, clean and sharp after the sterile hospital smell.
He helped her in, his hands careful, almost clinical, as he guided her onto the cracked vinyl seat. He tucked the skirt of the borrowed sweatpants she wore—her ruined dress was in a plastic bag at her feet—around her legs. He didn’t speak.
They drove through Lubbock, past strip malls and stoplights, then out onto the two-lane highway that led back toward home, and away from it. The silence was full of the truck’s rattles and the whine of the tires.
“We’re not going to my parents’,” she said, as he passed the turnoff.
“No.”
“Where are we going?”
“To get married.”
He drove straight to the squat, brick courthouse in their own town. The sight of it made Cass’s stomach clench. People would see. Word would travel faster than their old truck. Wade parked around back, in the shade of a pecan tree. “Wait here.”
He came back ten minutes later with a piece of paper and Max in tow.
Her little brother slid into the back seat of the cab, his face pale, his eyes huge. “Cass,” he breathed. “Mom’s a wreck. Dad’s… I’ve never seen him like that. He broke the kitchen table.”
“Are you okay?” Cass asked, twisting in her seat.
“I’m fine. He’s not mad at me. He’s just… mad.” Max looked from her to Wade, who was staring straight ahead, gripping the wheel. “Are you guys really doing this?”
“Yeah,” Wade said, putting the truck in gear. “We are.”
The judge lived in a modest white house on the edge of town. He was an older man with kind, tired eyes and tobacco stains on his fingers. He didn’t smile. He ushered them into a dim, book-lined study that smelled of old paper and lemon polish. He glanced at the license, then at Cass’s pale face and borrowed clothes, then at Wade’s set jaw.
“You both entering this of your own free will?” he asked, his voice a dry rustle.
“Yes, sir,” Wade said.
“Yes,” Cass echoed. Her own voice sounded small.
The judge recited the words. They were simple, stripped of poetry. In sickness and in health. Forsaking all others. Cass kept her eyes on Wade’s hands, curled at his sides. They were trembling, just slightly. When it was time, he fumbled a plain gold band from his jeans pocket. It was warm when he slid it onto her finger. It was too big. He had to squeeze her finger to keep it from falling off.
She had nothing for him. The judge produced a cheap, silver-plated band from a drawer. “For situations like this,” he muttered. Cass put it on Wade’s calloused finger. It looked strange there, against the dirt ingrained in his skin.
“By the power vested in me,” the judge said, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
There was no kiss. Wade just nodded, a sharp, tense movement. He shook the judge’s hand, pressed a folded twenty into it, and guided Cass back out to the truck. Max followed, silent as a ghost.
Back in the passenger seat, Cass stared at the too-large ring on her finger. It spun loosely. She was Cassidy Collins. The name felt like a suit of clothes she’d put on backwards.
Wade started the engine. “Max, I’ll drop you at the end of your lane. You shouldn’t be seen with us.”
“Where will you go?” Max asked, his voice cracking.
“My place. The old Henderson farm. You know the one, out on County Road 412.”
Max nodded. They drove the rest of the way in a silence so complete it was like a third person in the cab. At the turnoff to the McAllister farm, Wade pulled over but kept the engine running. Max climbed out, then leaned back in the window. His eyes were shiny.
“I’ll check on you,” he whispered to Cass. Then he looked at Wade, a boy trying to be a man. “You take care of her.”
“I will,” Wade said, and it sounded like a vow.
They watched Max walk up the long gravel drive, his shoulders hunched against the cold. Then Wade turned the wheel, pointing the truck west, away from everything Cass had ever known.
The road got rougher, the fields more sparse, the cedars thicker. After twenty minutes, he turned onto a dirt track almost hidden by overgrowth. It wound for half a mile before the house came into view.
It was a shack, really. A low-slung, weathered thing of grey wood with a sagging porch. The windows were dark, empty eyes. A rusted windmill stood silent sentinel in the yard. Beyond it, the land rolled away, brown and tough and lonely.
Wade cut the engine. The silence rushed in, absolute and immense.
“It’s not much,” he said, finally. He wouldn’t look at her. He just stared at the house, his knuckles white on the wheel. “But it’s ours.”
He came around and helped her out, his hands under her elbows. He didn’t carry her. He just supported her weight as they walked, slow as a funeral procession, up the crumbling path to the porch. The front door was unlocked. It groaned open on hinges that screamed.
The inside was one room, mostly. A dank, cold space with a bare wood floor, a stone fireplace filled with ashes, and a smell of dust and mice. A rickety table, two chairs. A door leading to what was probably a bedroom. There was no electricity that she could see. A single kerosene lantern sat on the table.
Wade led her to one of the chairs and she sank into it, the strength leaving her legs. He stood in the center of the room, his hat in his hands, looking suddenly lost. The adrenaline was gone. The grim determination had gotten them here, to the threshold. Now they were inside, and the reality of it was vast and hollow and cold.
He turned to look at her, sitting in the gloom in her borrowed sweats, her hair a mess, her face pale, her ring spinning on her finger. His new wedding band glinted dully in the weak light filtering through the dirty windows.
“I’ll get a fire going,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Then I’ll go into town. Get some supplies. A better lantern. A space heater. Food.”
She just nodded, wrapping her arms around herself. The cramping had started again, a dull, threatening ache. She was bleeding. She was married. She was in a shack in the middle of nowhere with a man who was now her husband.
Wade knelt before the fireplace, stacking kindling with efficient, practiced movements. His shoulders were rigid. He struck a match. The tiny flame caught, grew, licking at the dry wood. He stayed there, crouched, watching it as if it were the most important thing in the world.l
The fire began to crackle, throwing jagged, dancing shadows on the walls. The light reached Cass, touching her feet, her hands, her face.
Wade didn’t turn around. He spoke to the flames, his voice so low she almost didn’t hear it.
“We’ll be alright,” he said. It wasn’t a promise to her. It sounded like a prayer.