Archive of Our Own

Just before our love got lost, you said,
"I am as constant as a northern star"
And I said, "Constantly in the darkness,
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar."

***

“He’ll never be our son,” Rip had warned her, like he could read her mind. He’d said it softly, his hand stroking gently over the tips of her hair where it fell over her shoulder, with eyes so wide that she couldn’t escape them if she tried. Not there, not curled up in his lap with all her defenses down. There was a warmth about his words, laced with caution and compassion, that made them sting all the more, the cruelty of their truth twisting in her gut. “No matter what he becomes, he’ll never be that.” 

It had felt too defensive to disagree, like Carter was nothing but a crutch, no different from the bourbon in her glass. All of it to fill up something empty inside her. 

Later, when the boy called her mama like it rolled off his tongue real easy, for just a brief moment, Beth let him. The truth was, she didn’t notice it right away. For one shimmering, golden moment in time, her whole life was different; she was somebody else, somebody with the right to claim that title from him. It caught her completely off her guard because she hadn’t noticed the tension building to this, the way Carter had been pulling a thin, fraying elastic thread between them, stretching it taut, drawing her closer, until, finally, a single word had snapped it loose. Because Rip was right. She sure wasn’t anybody’s mama. She wasn’t fit to be anybody’s mama: the hardness of her own mother had poisoned the bloodline and calcified inside her, and there remained a wildness in her spirit like one of Yellowstone’s gray wolves had taken a bite out of the family tree right where her branch hung. 

Back when she saw Carter sitting in the back of that dusty pick-up truck, all she could see in him was Rip at 15 years old, sitting there with nothing and no one, and she knew, instinctively, she couldn’t walk away. A part of her felt like it was him, a simulacrum of their lost child. And while Rip had pointedly stated otherwise, her husband had no idea what it was to walk around wondering about the kid that never was: what he’d look like, how he’d be, whose eyes he’d have. She chose to protect him from that.

Much like Rip before him, it hadn’t taken too long before Carter learned the rules of life on the ranch. He does as Rip and her father tell him. He takes the jobs nobody in their right mind wants to do and he learns not to complain. He seemed to figure out quickly that the not-complaining gets noticed in small ways; Rip rewards him with a ride out together, or an extra half-hour feeding the horses, or a card game in the bunkhouse. He knows not to draw attention to these little rewards but instead to enjoy them without fuss. The gratitude is best reflected in work ethic instead of words. Words never get you too far with Rip Wheeler. 

With Beth, Carter learns from his mistakes. He senses not to push her. It’s a lesson a teenage Rip had learned 20 years earlier. 

Carter observes the boundary lines of her generosity and her compassion with a cautious respect, never again chancing a term of endearment or an overt hint of affection. He seems to realize that by not pushing, those harshly marked lines fade in time. Beth starts to allow fondness to bloom in the parts of herself that have long been closed off from emotion, like anesthesia wearing off, sensation slowly returning: the experience of letting someone new in. There hasn’t been anyone new, not her whole adult life. There was Rip when they were kids, and then there wasn’t. Letting him back in – even just a sliver, at first – had felt like a surrender of all her strength. With Carter, it feels even more daring; she feels as if she is the younger of the two of them in so many ways, her greatest vulnerabilities exposed as she plays the part of mother while denying it all the same. She wants it now, wants it so bad it burns behind her eyes whenever she looks at her husband or this boy and thinks of it, but there is also the persistent urge to reject it all before Carter can reject her. The memory of the cross on that stick, the sterile smell in that clinic, the pain after – it haunts her every time she lays her head down and closes her eyes.

Carter is careful with her, though, and the urge to push him away never quite breaches the surface. She wonders if Rip had cautioned her for fear that too much too soon would’ve spooked her. Whether consciously or not, he was protecting the kid as much as he was protecting Beth.

It’s when Rip allows the boy to finish up work early that they often wind up alone together, Beth and Carter. Rip stays out working from sunrise to sundown, seeing to the business of the ranch and dutifully settling scores on behalf of John Dutton, but he usually makes sure Carter’s done in time for dinner each day. Beth knows it’s a silent gift to her. She can tell her husband senses the lonely melancholia that creeps in when she’s gone too long without him. 

This evening time together, just Beth and Carter alone in what must be the grandest log cabin in all of Montana, steadily forges a quiet bond rooted in card games and conversation. Despite the vastness of the Duttons’ living room, a coziness manages to creep in. Around their makeshift dinner table, Beth teaches him the art of manipulation while repeatedly taking him for a fool at blackjack, though she solemnly warns, “You ever try to lie to me or bullshit me without a hand of cards between us, you’re outta here without a minute to pack your bags.”

He replies with a nod. It’s a habit he’s picked up lately, an endearing imitation of Rip.

They play and they talk, and it’s a ritual Beth comes to look forward to. It is uncomplicated by the scheming in her dynamic with Jamie, the weight of responsibility she feels with her father and Kayce, or the lingering guilt she’ll always carry for all that she’s done to Rip. 

In a funny old way, alone with Carter, she feels completely free. He is a new start, a blank slate, a second chance. 

He’s not her son. He’ll never be her son. But he matters to her. 

Long after dark, the two of them are still up when Rip finally comes in from working the ranch. It’s become a shared habit to wait up for him. Beth would do it alone, but there’s a protective nature about the boy that stops him leaving her. She can tell by the way he’s always so quick to get away from them once Rip comes home. He winces like a child embarrassed by their parents and Beth feels a pang of longing at that thought. It’s so achingly close to the daydream, perhaps even close enough to free her from her nightmares. “Carter was just learning how to beat me at cards,” she declares on one particularly competitive night as Rip takes off his hat and leans down to kiss the bare line of her shoulder, pressing his lips to one side of the thin strap of her dress.

“Honey, he ain’t no match for you,” he drawls sweetly, his hand sweeping absently over her casually-mussed hair as he glances up at the boy shifting restlessly in his seat.  

“I didn’t say he managed it.” A teasing, triumphant grin spreads across her upturned face as she watches Carter attempt to make his escape. 

Rip laughs and then, like he too wants to mortify the kid, leans down to kiss her properly, his warm hum of his amusement fading against her mouth. His rough, calloused hands sweep across her cheeks with a tenderness that contradicts the gruff and grit of him. She turns her body to meet him like it’s a dance and she’s learned every move, hooking her arms around his neck to draw him in deeper. She can feel the sweat and grime of a day’s work on his skin as it melts into hers, the desire to work up a sweat of her own stirring low between her legs. There is a hunger that’s grown urgent in just a few hours apart, the requited nature of which proves evident in the way he kisses her like he’s coming up for air. She savors the sturdiness of his body against her small, light frame, her hands running appreciatively across his broad shoulders, his strong arms, his solid back, his tight ass.

“You guys are gross!” Carter complains, his face contorting in disgust as he comes back quickly to grab the cherished hat he’d left behind.

“Watch your mouth or I’ll have you cleaning out the stalls all day,” Rip warns, though the heated grin he holds looking at Beth doesn’t quite match his tone. 

“I’d rather clean stalls for a week than spend another minute here,” Carter mutters, leaving Rip and Beth to each other. Beth notes the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth like maybe he’s a little more okay with it than he lets on: mortified, but fond. 

Rip only chuckles at the boy’s griping – rich, deep, melodic ripples of laughter that relax every muscle in her body. His laughter runs through her like a steaming hot drink on a cold winter’s night, flooding through every inch of her until she’s all warmed up. Nothing beats an easy smile from this serious man. As she looks up at him, admiring the way his eyes crinkle at the corners and his mouth slopes to one side, Rip keeps his eyes fixed on Beth, his expression turning serious the longer he stares. He stares like he’s studying her, like he’s memorizing the scar on her cheek and the particular blue of her eyes and the sharp points of her cupid’s bow. She feels his attention skate across her features, a self-conscious tingle trailing his gaze. 

Beth cuts through the silence to ask, “How was your night, dear?” It’s dry. Ironic. It sounds like somebody else’s line, the role of wife fitting like a new pair of shoes, not yet comfortably worn in. 

“Oh, you know, ‘nother fight in the bunkhouse to break up, new foal in the stable. Same old shit,” Rip explains, then he leans closer to her ear to add, “Missed my wife all fucking day.” 

“Oh, you did, huh?”

“Mmm.” He gives a low moan as he feels Beth up, urged along by the compliance of her body. He’s leaning over her, hands running slowly, purposefully, down her back until he reaches the curve of her ass and squeezes hard. Enough to make her moan. His grip tilts her up toward him, her hand clutching at his face, holding it against hers as they breathe into each other’s mouths. He could slide her dress up and fuck her right there if he wanted to, if he didn’t have more respect for John Dutton’s house than that. Instead, he teases her closer as she lifts her legs to clamp around his waist, his hands dragging from her hip along the side of her leg, then back up, his grip tight enough that she can’t help but buck up. 

Beth lets their noses brush before pressing her cheek to his. She leans closer, taking the lobe of his ear between her teeth and tugging. She can feel the effect it has, the swell of him hard between her legs as she whispers – as seductively as she can muster, “Shame it’s just me here, then. But I can make you feel good, baby,” she promises playfully, her eyes daring him to believe it as that word, that name, works on him like a charm. “And maybe you can fuck me quick before she gets home.”

“Woman, you are fuckin’ crazy.” In one smooth, swift motion, he lifts her up, one hand under her ass, squeezed hard into the soft flesh beneath her dress, and the other firm on her back as she stays wrapped around his waist.  

Beth hangs off him weightlessly, letting him kiss and bite the curve of her neck as she runs her hands roughly through the dark, matted curls of his hair. “Better be real nice to me, Rip,” she warns breathlessly, “or I’ll tell your little wife what you’ve been doing to me.”

“My wife would kill you for even looking at me.”

“You’re not fucking wrong,” Beth concedes, kissing him so slow and deep, he has to press her against the nearest wall just to steady himself. When she pulls away, she sinks her teeth into his bottom lip and drags on it slowly, the acrid, metallic taste of blood on her tongue as she looks up at him through her eyelashes.

“Darlin’, don’t you worry.” She feels his hand slide inside her underwear as he stares into her eyes, his thumb sweeping along her slick opening while the other hand bears the weight of her. His touch makes her feel liquid, the long drawl of his voice finishing the job as he whispers low and quiet, “She’s gonna be gone all night. We can go real slow.”

A perfect motherfucker. 

Beth kisses him again, drawing it out until she has to come up for air. It’s a taste of his reward for playing along with her little game. Rip senses the intent of it, responding like his body is an extension of hers simply slotting into place. He carries her up the stairs, ascending higher and higher still as he throws her onto the bed and fucks her until she feels herself floating on the feeling. A sheen of sweat shines on him in the moonlight and she thinks, for just a brief moment, they might truly be sparkling among the stars.

***

“Kid’s got himself a girl,” Rip tells her late one night as they’re lying together in the sated after. She’s resting her cheek against his chest, her fingernails scratching delicate patterns through the blanket of dark, thick hair there as she sinks into the comforting heat of him, a pleasant ache lingering between her legs as the recent memory of his touch ghosts across her skin. 

“He told you that?” she wonders aloud, surprised by the hurt she feels that Carter would’ve confided in Rip instead of her. She doesn’t let Rip see her reaction but, by the way he starts to stroke a hand over her hair, she wonders if he senses it nonetheless.

“Nah, it’s obvious. Kept tryna sneak off today.” In typical Rip fashion, he cuts a long story short: “I caught ‘em together in the stalls looking guilty as sin.” 

“Oh, he took ‘roll in the hay’ literally.” 

She feels a light rumble of amusement beneath her head as he replies, “Guess so.” 

As a contented silence stretches out between them, the darkness of their bedroom fills with lighter memories. She can still remember the friction burns from stolen moments between the two of them in that damn barn.

“I think it’s sweet,” Beth decides, turning her head so that she’s looking up at him, her chin resting on her hand at the center of his chest. “It’s sweet, right? That he’s got a girl.”

“Fuck knows. Dating at their age… it’s all so fucking dramatic.” Rip shakes his head, then runs a hand over his eyes, rubbing at them as though just the thought of it exhausts him. “Woulda been easier – for us, at least – if he stuck to saddling horses and shoveling shit.”

A wry smile pulls at Beth’s lips as she teases, “Hard to believe that wasn’t enough for him, now you put it like that.”

“Beth–”

She shifts up onto her elbow to pointedly raise her eyebrows at him. “And you should be careful what you say about dating at that age or I might just take it personally.”

“We made plenty of trouble, the two of us,” he points out, though wistfulness overshadows any hint of regret. 

“You think it’s like it was for us with them?”

Rip toys with a lock of her hair, moving it behind the line of her shoulder before he tenderly runs a finger along where strands of blonde border her face. “No,” he replies, leaving a pause so long she wonders if that’s all he’ll say on the matter. Eventually, he adds, “It was different with us,” and it confirms everything she feels. “Wasn’t hormonal kids just in the same place, same time. We were bigger than all that. We loved each other like fuckin’ crazy.”

“It’s true, you know,” she finds it necessary to assure him. “I loved you more than I was ready for. Too much. Since the day I met you.” She clears her throat, feeling the strain of tightness. It forces her to shy from his gaze, her eyes drifting to the window and noticing the way the half-drawn curtain cuts the perfect roundness of the full moon in half. “I know I didn’t always–” 

“I knew,” he cuts her off. He knew. He always knew. Some part of her always believed that; it was the only way to make sense of his patience, the way she could tear them apart time after time and he’d start over like he hadn’t learned a thing. She would fly far, far away but always find herself returning, as sure as a bird’s migration pattern, expecting this time, this time, would be the one when he’d finally draw a bitter line between them. Despite her many years of unrelenting self-sabotage, the well of forgiveness never seemed to dry up.

“It scared me,” she manages to say, her voice meek as a whisper. 

“Beth Dutton, scared? And here I thought nothing could scare you,” he says it so warmly, as if trying to help her keep up the fragile facade she wears. He knows better than anyone that it’s all just self-preservation. Why else would she have kept running so long? 

“I know you see past that shit, baby. Just don’t go tellin’ on me to anybody else, okay?”

“Alright,” he surrenders easily. There’s a hint of a smile on his face; the line of his lips is straight as ever, but there’s a twinkle in his eye. “I won’t.”

His good humor fades instantly when she adds, “And don’t you dare die.”

“Beth…”

“No,” she continues stubbornly, sitting upright and pinning him to the bed with her fierce gaze. With the sheet pooled at her waist and her naked chest exposed to him, his eyes never move from hers despite ample temptation. He reaches up a hand to brush away the tear glittering in the corner of her eye, soaking it up with the pad of his thumb. She sniffs away the next wave and warns him, like he can do a thing about it, “You’re not allowed to die. You said you’d outlive me when we made our promises, so you don’t get to die. I don’t get to run and you don’t get to die. That’s the deal now.”

“Okay, baby,” he concedes, running his fingertips over the gnarled stretch of burns at the base of her spine, the sensation of his touch uneven where numb scarring meets sensitive skin. Tenderly, he moves upwards, to the smoother plain between her shoulder blades, eventually curling his fingers around her neck to bring her back down to him. 

“Same goes for my dad, and Carter,” she admits, shifting to lie over him once more, her leg sliding between his. 

“Carter makes the list, huh?” he asks, low and quiet, before he presses a kiss to her head and surrenders to a deep, growling yawn. She curls into him a little closer, pulling the sheet up high enough to cover her modesty. 

“Carter makes the list.” She nods against his shoulder, smiling against the bare skin of it. 

“Well, alright then.” 

“So, you’re gonna have a little chat with him about the birds and the bees. You know, man to man. Check he’s okay, and that this girl’s at least a few notches lower than me on the crazy scale.”

“Baby,” Rip sighs, shifting against his pillow the way he often does when their late night conversations are wrapping up, the bone-tiredness he’s been resisting finally starting to draw him in. She’d stay up all night with him if she could, making up for lost days with nights so long they fade into morning. “I’ll keep an eye on the kid but I ain’t gonna get into all that.”

Beth stares up at the ceiling, trying to imagine how that conversation would go. “He’s a good kid,” she muses. 

“Mmm.”

“He’ll be less of a fuck-up than us, right?”

“Sure, honey,” Rip murmurs, half-asleep already. 

And, just like that, she’s lost him to the kind of deep sleep she’s never known. She can only watch and marvel at it as she lies awake trying to imagine Carter’s girl. She wonders if it’s serious, if they’re just learning with each other, if they feel that wildfire that seemed to spread between herself and Rip the moment the first match got lit. 

***

It’s a few weeks before it turns into trouble.

Wandering out to the barn in search of Rip, Beth finds the kid weeping on a hay bale, half-concealed by the youngest horse on the ranch, little Domino. Carter had named the animal for the noticeable white spots in his coat, with more of the small markings seeming to appear each time he’d come down to check on him during those first few days. Rip hadn’t said too much to the suggestion, but slowly the other ranch hands started to call him by the name. It doesn’t take much for a name like that to stick around the ranch, fitting as it was. 

The boy’s well-known fondness for the young horse makes it easy for Beth to identify the source of the audible sniffling instantly. Confirming her suspicions as she peers into the stall, she notices Carter’s beloved ivory cowboy hat, abandoned beside him. 

Then she sees Carter. His cheeks are blotchy and shining with tears. His knuckles are bleeding, his fist still clenched. There’s a vacant look in his eyes as she tries to catch his attention.

“Carter, sweetheart,” Beth starts, before she can stop herself. Passing the horse, though unable not to turn her nose up at the pile of excrement left ignored only meters from the boy, she sidles up next to him on the bale of hay. An arm slipping around his shoulders, she says, “Okay, kid. What’s… What’s goin’ on?” 

The question prompts a fresh burst of sobs. He falls into them and she catches him, letting the boy writhe in her arms a long while to let it all out. There’s a wildness about him that reminds Beth of herself at that age, the way it felt like she’d never be done crying all her tears; there was always some left in the jar. She could sob and sob like the world was ending because once upon a time, it did, and this boy knew it just the same. He too had been hardened by the loss of a parent, left without the closure of a real goodbye. She couldn’t blame him for feeling all of it because sometimes, some days, she still wakes up in the middle of the night and finds herself back there: lost, alone, weak. Always too weak to save her mother, too weak not to destroy every jagged piece of herself in the aftermath. 

Beth strokes her fingers gently through his dark mop of curls, soothing him to stillness like he’s the baby she imagined rather than the 16-year-old she once offered a cigarette to.

“Carter, what’s goin’ on?” she asks again eventually, once she’s sure he’s drained enough by the tears that they finally stop for good. 

She feels him stiffen in her arms.

“I can’t help you if you won’t let me, kid. I do know that whatever it is won’t be half as bad as it feels right now.” Beth sighs out a deep breath. “Nothin’ ever is.”

A silence breathes between them.

“Halie’s pregnant,” he confesses, his voice scratchy and hollow. He utters it so quietly it’s more like a breath, a puff of air and nothing more. The secret floats from his lips to her ears without the body of his voice behind it. 

She hears it.

It takes a moment longer for Beth to take it in. 

Halie? she wonders briefly. The girl Rip warned her about.

Her eyes fill with tears, a flood of emotion bearing down on her cheeks and taking her completely by surprise. It washes over her like a tidal wave she doesn’t see coming. There’s no time to run or hide or brace. It hits with a crash and then sweeps her up, and all she can think to do is cling to the boy like he’s her life raft or she is his. 

The tears come trickling down her face, thick, salty tears flowing in paths that seem to course in every direction: into the creases around her nose, over her chin, down the column of her neck, dampening her hair where it begins to stick to her face. She can’t quite figure out the meaning of them. Fear for that scared girl and the person she was back then. Grief at the memories, dramatic snapshots flashing in her mind, though it’s the memory of a broader melancholia that aches deepest. Sadness sinking in with a steady permanence, as if finally granted an invitation to step out of the shadows. Longing for a child of her own. Profound sorrow at all the things that Rip doesn't know and all the ways in which they’ll hurt him. 

Time is a flat motherfucking circle. Everything we have done or will do, we will do over and over and over again—forever, she thinks bitterly, remembering hearing those words back in college and knowing it would be her curse. 

When the wave passes, rippling out to a calmer place, Beth puts a firm hand on his face and turns it to look at her, forcing him to sit up beside her. “Can’t stay in here, kid.” The break in her voice catches her out, the words burning her throat with each word she speaks. “We gotta go back up to that house and figure something out between us. Hear me?” 

“He’s gonna kick me out,” he warns her, though it sounds more like begging. His voice is filled with childlike desperation and there’s a smallness about him now. It seems so strange, so impossible, that he could be anybody’s father. “This place is the only thing I have.”

“No,” she says decisively, because she knows Rip better than the kid does. Better than anyone. 

She can feel Carter shaking again as he tries to blink away his tears. 

“I promise.” That seems to settle him. She nods like she means it, too. “Alright? I promise.”

“I didn’t mean for it–”

“Oh, kid,” she says, letting out another tired sigh before fumbling in her pocket for a cigarette. “No one ever means it.” She lets it hang out the side of her mouth, reaching for her lighter, as she adds, “Till they do, and then it’s a fuckin’ wing and a prayer.”

As she lights her smoke and takes a drag, the boy glances up with a half-kernel of a question in his eyes. She can tell his head is too fogged with everything else he’s feeling to discern her meaning, otherwise she wouldn’t have uttered it. He only looks at her sadly, like a puppy begging for its life. She breaks eye contact with the kid to exhale a long silvery plume, her eyes drifting instead to the horse, counting the light markings across his back the way her mama used to get her to count herself to sleep, like it might settle the wild thoughts spinning out in her mind. 

With the cigarette hanging between her index and middle finger, Beth drags her teeth across her bottom lip as she stares at Domino. “Hell of a fuckin’ smell in here,” she comments, giving Carter a sideways glance just in time to catch his laugh. It slices through the awful tension like a knife. 

The dark look on his face doesn’t entirely disappear, but a little light sneaks in through the cracks. 

Eventually, Beth glances down at him again, and says, like it ain’t nothing but a matter of fact, “You’re family.” She says it like it’s merely a reminder, like he should know as much already. “It’ll be handled like family.”

“Thank you,” he says, sniffing back some dignity and wiping the snot from above his lip.

“Oh, don’t thank me.” Beth manages a wicked smile, a teasing lilt to her words. She takes another drag, then adds, “Doesn’t mean my husband won’t try knocking some sense into you. You’re in for some tough love, kid.”

Carter glances at her sheepishly.

“Come on.” Beth stands abruptly, done with the smell of shit filling her nostrils and the rough straw against her legs and the intolerable sad-eyes she’s getting. She decisively walks out of there and calls back over her shoulder, “You and I got some shit to deal with. And after that, looks like you got some more shit to deal with in here.” 

Carter grabs his hat, then comes running after her. Just as she knew he would. As he always does.

***

It’s late – no sound except the distant howl of the wolves, the sky painted black but for tiny splatters of light – when Rip finishes up for the day and heads back to the house. He hadn’t even managed to take a break for dinner, out on errands for John that Beth knows better than to ask about. He walks in, past the two of them sitting across from each other at the table where they’d been waiting, simmering in tension, and heads straight to the Coors Banquet in the fridge. He pops the beer cap off using the edge of the counter and drinks it so fast it seems like it’s gone in a single gulp.

“Good day at the office, dear?” Beth calls out to him. 

Rip groans from the kitchen in reply, lining up his next beer before taking it with him back into the room with them. He takes his hat off and bends down to give Beth a greeting kiss before falling into the empty seat between them. 

He closes his eyes and lets out a long, deep sigh like he’s breathing out the whole damn day.

Beth wants to make it better. She imagines straddling his lap and turning his day around for him. She knows she’s more than capable of doing it because it’s become semi-routine: he puts his head to her chest while she runs her hand through his hair, asking him gentle questions about what has him so beat until he’s too caught up in her to remember the answers. 

Tonight, she knows she’s only going to make his day worse. 

He scratches through flattened, sweaty curls before having another swig of beer. 

It takes a while before he looks up and notices the secret lingering in the air. He stares at Beth like he can read her so well she might not even need to say anything; she wonders, briefly, if he can. She turns her gaze to Carter, who begins to shift in his seat, wringing his hands. The poor boy would never match her in poker.

Rip leans back slowly, placing the beer bottle down hard on the table as his eyes scan from one to the other as if watching a tennis match. “What the fuck is goin’ on with you two?” he asks in his typically brusque manner. Then he turns to Beth. “What’d he do?” 

She hesitates. All that comes to mind in the moment is, no different than you.

He turns his attention back to Carter, eyes narrowing on the kid.

“Baby, I think you gotta listen for a second. Take it in. I want you to be open-minded about this. You know, like I was about the fair. You remember, when we went to the fair and I let you feel me up on a picnic blanket while that handsome young man strummed his sad songs?”

Carter grimaces at the picture being painted but Beth gives an innocent shrug. If she’s got to piss off her husband for the foreseeable future, she might as well make it as excruciating for Carter as possible. One way to teach him a lesson.

“I remember the fuckin’ fair, Beth,” Rip says with growing impatience. 

“Okay, well, I’m just trying to remind you that sometimes it’s good to be open-minded.”

“If I have to help you two bury a body tonight, I swear to God–”

“Halie’s pregnant,” Carter blurts, cutting Rip off so suddenly he looks like he’s surprised himself.

Rip looks from Carter to Beth, who just grits her teeth and waits for the reaction to come. At first, it’s only a hesitant question, growled like he knows he doesn’t really want the answer: “Who the fuck is Halie?”

“Halie’s the girl,” Beth offers, laying a placating hand on his thigh. 

“This your doing?” 

Carter doesn’t dare to look up. Only nods.

Rip stands slowly, letting his chair scrape loudly across the wooden floor, his hands gripping the edge of the table as his imposing figure grows larger. In seconds, before anyone can react, he’s pushed the table completely out of the way and has both hands gripped to Carter’s collar. He drags him to the nearest wall and pins him there, unfazed by the sound of the boy’s head smacking against the wood paneling. 

Beth’s left sat in front of the empty space where the table had been, though she’d instinctively grabbed her drink in time. She stands, glass in hand, and saunters after them.

“Rip, honey–” she starts. 

“It was just… an accident. We didn’t mean for it to happen,” Carter pleads, staring back into the fierce, livid gaze of his boss, his mentor, his guardian. His hands cover Rip’s to pull them away, but the boy is a skinny wisp of a thing. Rip barely notices the attempt. 

“It was that hard to keep your your fuckin’ pants zipped?” 

“Like you two aren’t at it like rabbits every time you’re left alone!” Carter points out, his breath hitching mid-sentence like he’s used all his self-control up on not crying in front of Rip. Instead, his emotion spills out in the form of indignation. “Sometimes when you’re not!” 

Beth raises her eyebrows and bites down on her lip to stop from laughing. She can’t argue with the boy – and she respects the self-sabotaging boldness of the accusation. Though for Rip, it’s rather like poking a bear. He goes a darker shade of red, whether through anger or embarrassment, before snarling, “I’m a grown man who can take care of the situation. And while you’re in this house, you answer to us – you follow our fuckin’ rules!” 

“I do follow your rules. There’s no rule that says I can’t see my girlfriend!”

“There was an unspoken rule about not knocking girls up, kid,” Beth says gently, trying to help him out in the face of Rip’s temper. Already, though, she can tell the heat’s fading. Rip’s arm still holds the kid but not so tight. She smooths her hand across his back in soothing circles, the way she would when she used to find him out on the front porch worrying about something or other. Whether it works like a charm every time or simply elicits a Pavlovian response, she can feel it calming him again now. “Honey, before you put the boy through the wall, you wanna sit down and try a civilized conversation? Let him explain himself?”

Rip eyes the kid warily. “I can hear him fine from here.”

“Rip,” Beth tries again. This time he turns his head to meet her gaze. 

There is a moment’s hesitation, even with the powers of her persuasion, but eventually Rip nods and lets go, leaving Carter to slide free against the wall. The boy almost falls as he comes to his feet again but catches himself just in time. 

“Thought we’d got somewhere with you,” Rip mutters bitterly, and the sting is visible on Carter’s face. He looks like he’s been slapped. It hits him cruel and hard. When the boy blinks furiously, Beth knows he’s trying to hold back tears again. 

“You’re competing with teenage hormones, honey,” Beth reminds her husband, letting a hint of amusement breeze through the words to defuse the tension. It draws from a million other conversations between the two of them making light of the bleakest shit they’ve ever faced, because maybe, just maybe, the reminder that they’ve dealt with worse is what’ll save Carter’s ass right now.  “You didn’t stand a chance. Hell,” she teases, draping her arm around his tense shoulders, “when we were that age, you knew my dad might kill you or kick you off the ranch and you still spent the summer thinking up new places for us to sneak off to.”

When Rip looks at her, they’re suddenly alone in their own bubble and she can hear exactly what he’s thinking: that was us, we were different. Rip would’ve risked his life for a moment with her back then, and not a damn thing’s changed. She knows it and he knows it, with enough certainty to break her heart. It’s the kind of love that makes a person stupid – stupid enough to risk getting on the wrong side of John Dutton. This situation with Carter is nothing close, but what’s between them, what’s always been between them, at least earns the kid a little grace. 

“You know what she’s planning to do?” Rip asks both of them, shifting gears so that his tone meets Beth’s somewhere in the middle. 

Carter shakes his head.

“Bring her over and we’ll talk. We don’t even know what she’s thinking right now,” Beth reasons, her thoughts returning again and again to this poor, dumb girl hiding a baby inside her. When it was her time, Beth was so ill she could barely get out of bed, and she felt every tiny grain of sand in the egg timer of that pregnancy, knowing she had to sort it out before it was too late. What are the odds that this girl has it anymore together than she did? She didn’t have a clue. 

“Prob’ly dreamin’ up some fairy tale that makes this all okay,” Rip grumbles.

“Oh, I doubt it,” Beth says distantly. She looks away, first to the kid and then, when she feels the prick of tears, to the floor. “She’ll be scared shitless, just like him.”

“How’d this even happen, kid?” 

Carter stands awkwardly in front of them like he’s wondering if he has to explain procreation to Rip or simply whimper his way through an anecdote about a split condom. 

Despite her better judgment, Beth takes pity on the boy, partly because the opportunity to return to winding her husband up seems too good to refuse. It feels rather like reverting to her natural state, an easy way to course-correct her emotions. “Maybe it wouldn’t’ve if you’d given him The Talk,” she says flippantly, before smacking him lightly on the chest. 

Rip catches her hand and gives her a look of warning that she interprets as an invitation to tease him further. “Beth.” 

“I’m just sayin’, no one’s blameless here. ‘Cept me.” She gives an innocent shrug and a coy smile, her eyes looking up at him from under her overgrown bangs. “I tried to give him The Talk.”

“And how’d that go, honey?” When he calls her honey, she knows she’s got him back on-side, even with the way he makes himself all big like they’re both spoiling for a fight, even with his low, throaty sigh, even with the stern look in his eye. It’s all play. Even when it’s really fucking serious, with them it’s not. 

Beth smirks. “I think it’s best man-to-man.” 

“Mmm? That’s convenient.” 

She can’t help but laugh at the way he rolls his eyes. Beth turns to hold his face in her hands and kiss his cheek as she whispers, “Don’t worry. I forgive you, baby.” 

“Oh, you do? Oh, thank you,” he replies, every word loaded heavy with sarcasm. 

Carter makes the mistake of smiling at the two of them, momentarily forgetting himself and the situation he’s got himself into. It comes crashing down on him like an anvil when Rip catches the amusement on his face and barks, “What you grinning about, kid? Fuck off to bed. You’re gonna have a busy fuckin’ day tomorrow.”

As Carter starts to walk away, Rip calls after him, “Better get a good night’s sleep,” like it’s a stone-cold threat. Beth grimaces at the kid when his little Bambi eyes meet hers, but for now she only pats Rip on the chest as if to silently communicate, that’ll do. 

“Carter,” she follows up in a softer voice. “Call the girl tomorrow. Have her come over. We’ll talk, figure it out.”

The boy gives a solemn nod before making himself scarce. 

When he’s gone, Beth pulls away from Rip to shake her head at him. “I think you made your point,” she tells him, using her hip to nudge the table back to where it was. 

A step behind her, Rip moves to retuck the chairs under it and picks his bottle up. “Kid’s trouble.”

“Kid’s in trouble,” she corrects him, moving close and stilling in the warmth of his personal space, close enough to feel his breath ghost against her cheek. She presses her pointer finger to his chest. “Ain’t got no parents, no friends ‘side from us, no no one.” 

“He’s got you soft.” It’s a warm, gentle assertion rather than a stern accusation. He’s trying to get under her skin, not that he ever had to try at that. 

Beth holds her open palm to Rip’s face, her thumb sweeping over it to caress the line of his beard. “Maybe he has. Maybe that ain’t no bad thing.” She kisses him tenderly, just once, letting her softness be a gift to him. When she leaves to carry her glass on through to the kitchen, she can feel his eyes following her. 

***

It turns out, the girl’s sweet. Beth even thinks she might like her. The way she likes Monica. It’s pity and envy all at once, a certain admiration for the miracle of being a simple, nice person in a world so cruel and complicated. There is an innocence about Halie that makes her seem younger than her years. When Beth was that age, she was mean and raw and barely present inside her body. Men who’d talk to her in bars would always wind up telling her she was an old head on young shoulders, mature for her age. Beth bought it back then, even though part of her knew it just was their malevolent excuse, their defense for chatting up a vulnerable kid.

Halie really is a kid. Perhaps it just seems that way through the eyes of a 38-year-old woman. Perhaps that’s how Beth seemed too, to those with no ill intentions.

The day Carter’s girl comes over to the ranch for the family introductions, the first thing Beth notices is the way her mousy brown hair is swept into two long braids like something out of Little House on the Prairie . She walks into the sitting room with her hand squeezing Carter’s, the smallness of her frame exaggerated by her posture. It’s like she’s preemptively hiding a bump that isn’t there yet, her shoulders hunched with a baggy cardigan wrapped over itself and held in place by her arm where it clutches the other, the one that’s holding Carter’s hand. Beth can almost feel the girl vibrating with fear as she rises from Rip’s lap to greet them and gently says, “It’s okay, sweetie. You want a tea, some water, anything?” 

“I’ll take a glass of water,” Halie replies, barely above a whisper. “Thank you, Mrs Wheeler.”

Beth looks down at Rip and smiles, running her hand fondly through his hair. “I’d say you can call me Beth, but I don’t mind hearing that name.” He doesn’t quite smile with her, but there’s a softness in his eyes that betrays his impassive front. 

Halie gives a nervous laugh and nods, standing awkwardly in no man’s land like she’s afraid to fully enter the room with them. She’s still clinging to Carter for dear life, though he’s too fixated on Rip to notice. He’s just as frozen as she is, looking just as much of a stranger in his own home.

“Please, sit,” Beth insists, gesturing in the direction of the empty couch before heading off to fetch the drink. 

When she returns, she finds the other three sitting in silence. Rip’s still brooding in the chair while the two kids sit side by side on the couch like they’re sat in a doctor’s waiting room bracing for the worst. Beth places the glass of water down on a coaster on the coffee table in front of Halie, then heads to the drinks cabinet to pour herself something a little stronger. 

“This isn’t exactly how I imagined the whole meeting-the-parents thing would go,” Halie says, breaking the silence. 

Beth spins around, her mouth open as if to speak but no words are coming.

Carter cuts in to say, “They’re not–it’s not–” 

“Sorry.” Halie winces, drawing her hand away from Carter’s to pull at a loose thread on her dress. “My mama always says I run my mouth…” 

“More of a crisis meeting than an introduction,” Beth says, cutting in to ease the tension, the glass in her hand adding a little flair to the shrug she gives. As she moves to sit in the empty chair opposite Rip, she manages to artfully steer the subject elsewhere, back to the subject at hand: “So, uh, Halie, have you… have you told your mama? Or anyone, for that matter?”

Halie shakes her head. “Just Carter. I wanted to… figure things out first. My parents are real traditional and they–I couldn’t…”

At first, she keeps looking down at her fidgeting hands, as if too afraid to look at anyone else in the room. But when she lifts her head and meets Beth’s eyes, with tears sitting on her lashes and a question unspoken between them, Beth understands exactly what Halie feels. It is a time machine looking her in the eye, and she knows, instantly, that she’s going to handle this like she’s helping her teenage self, like maybe the lost pieces of the girl she once was can still be saved. 

“That’s alright. Listen, the way I see it, I think you got three choices, sweetheart,” Beth says very carefully, locking her gaze on Halie and leaning forward in her seat. The girl is rapt. It’s as if she can read the lines across her face, like she knows what once frosted Beth’s icy-blue eyes, like those unspeakable truths of the past have pierced her subconscious. She listens carefully, her hand balling to a fist on her knee as Beth explains, “You can have it and raise it, and know that that’s what your life’ll be from now on. You can have it and find somebody else to raise it. Or you can make it go away.”

A small, glistening tear trails down Halie’s cheek as she nods slowly. She even cries pretty, Beth thinks, noticing the way the light refracts where it falls.

“Ain’t nobody here ‘bout to tell you what to do,” Rip says, and it’s gentle for Rip, but his low, gruff voice still seems to catch the girl by surprise. 

Beth has to clear a lump in her throat before she can add, “Nobody else can make that decision for you. But whatever you decide, you got the three of us, whatever that counts for.”

She notices Carter reach over to take Halie’s hand again. Her fist goes flat beneath his touch and she turns her palm up to his in silent reply. The gesture makes Beth wish she wasn’t so far from Rip, that he had the power to comfort her with an absentminded touch. When she finds his steady gaze waiting for her across the room, she is struck by his innate cognizance of her emotions. In this long, winding dance between them, he has a faultless ability to anticipate the precise beats of the song that will break her rhythm. The way he looks back at her – concerned and curious – affords Beth a moment of startling clarity. Rip would’ve done this, she accepts only now. He would’ve sat with her and squeezed her hand protectively. He would’ve chosen her above anything else: pride, fear, shame. He would’ve looked John Dutton in the eye and accepted his penance.

With all the strength that Rip’s warm gaze affords her, Beth narrows her attention on Halie again. She studies the girl carefully, wary of leading her down a path she doesn’t want to choose. She simply won’t let her choose wrong, and wrong isn’t about making the same choice as Beth or the opposite choice to Beth. Wrong’s just about what isn’t in Halie’s heart. It’s about what she does and doesn’t want for her own future. 

It takes Beth by surprise, once the girl’s tear has been brushed away, that she manages to sit up a little straighter and find enough voice to say, “Mrs Wheeler, it counts for a whole lot.”

Beth smiles, touched by the sentiment, but it’s more than that – she’s impressed. She’s impressed by the forthright confidence of the way she says it, full-voiced and certain. Still, she’s quick to reassure Halie, “You don’t have to decide today. But–”

“Mrs Wheeler,” the girl cuts in, “I know what I wanna do.” She dares to glance to her left, to look at Carter for just a moment. Beth wonders if it’s a last look. One last look at him before she says something that might change everything between them. It’s only a fleeting pause before she turns back to Beth. “I just didn’t know… how to… get it done. Where to go.”

Beth understands what she’s asking. 

“Is that…” – Halie breathes in deep – “okay?”

“Yes,” Beth replies, though the body of her voice is gone. It’s a wisp of a sound, uttered as quickly as the question is asked. “It’s okay. I can–I can help you figure things out.”

Halie turns to Carter, not even daring to look him in the eye. “Can you… forgive me?” 

Beth has to bite down on her lip to stop the tears from falling at those words. Those words that had plagued her mind, years of wondering: could he forgive her? For not being ready. For lying to him. For destroying their future. 

She can feel Rip’s unwavering gaze still watching over her. She has to drop her head to conceal wet cheeks behind the long, thick sweep of her unkempt bangs. 

There’s a part of her, in the silence that follows, that wants to run across to Carter and shake him. Waiting for him to reply feels like waiting to hear her answer – Rip’s reply – after all these years. It seems to drag on for minutes, but maybe it’s barely any time at all, before the kid says, “Halie, I care about you, I just wanna support you,” like it’s not a question of forgiveness. 

There’s a fist of emotion constricting her throat, squeezing so hard she can’t even draw a breath. It’s taking every bit of strength not to let out a sob, not to fall apart before all three of them.

“Are you sure?” Halie asks, breathless with relief. 

Carter replies with a boyish smile, nodding at her like there’s no one else in the room. He collects up her tears and takes hold of her hand again, and Halie looks renewed, like now that she’s been brave enough to admit what she wants, he’s given her the strength to actually do it. 

“I’ll make some arrangements for you,” Beth offers by way of reassurance, painting on a smile. When she adds, “You’ll be okay,” she’s speaking to herself as much as to Halie, like saying it might make it true. 

“You’re gonna be a damn sight more careful in future,” Rip adds, aiming the comment primarily at Carter. 

“Yes, sir,” Halie answers on behalf of the two of them. “I admit I am prone to making a few mistakes from time to time, but I do credit myself on not making the same ones over again.”

“Well, good,” Beth says decisively, glad to see the girl’s spirit a little more emboldened. It’s a comfort to see her stand up for herself and speak her mind; it reassures Beth that Carter’s girl comprehends enough to make the decision. “Glad we could get that one ticked off the list, never to be repeated then,” she dares to joke. 

“Beth–” Rip starts in that same weary, stern way he likes to say her name. 

Beth cuts off a sip of her drink for a conspiratorial stage-whisper: “My husband likes to chastise me.”

Halie laughs, just a little, on cue and Carter smiles when he notices. He loves her, Beth observes, watching the delicate way his thumb moves in gentle strokes over the back of her hand. For a moment, it really feels no different than your classic meet-the-parents. Beth can’t help but give Rip a pointed glare, like she was right to make her little joke all along. It happens fast, an instinctive switch of gaze, no different from every other time her eyes naturally settle on him in a room. This time, though, she’s unprepared for what greets her: the grin he wears, an unbearable fondness in his eyes like he loves her and he doesn’t care who notices. It sucks every bit of amusement out of her body, the frenzy of butterflies turning her stomach.

Beth swallows, shying away from it by focusing her attention on the kids. 

“Thank you for helpin’ me,” Halie says with renewed sincerity, addressing the words to both Beth and Rip. “I, uh… I don’t know what I’d do otherwise an’ you’ve all been real understanding.” 

Rip replies, “Carter’ll be paying for it for years, if that eases your conscience.” 

“Ignore him.” 

“Okay,” Halie says with a shy giggle. 

Later, after the girl’s gone home with her head held a little higher, Rip wanders into the bathroom as Beth’s washing her face and kisses the back of her head. There’s a look in his eyes as they meet hers in the mirror that tells her he’s got something on his mind. 

“What was that for?”

“You’re one strong motherfucker, you know that?”

Beth turns, leaning her hips back against the bathroom counter. She kisses him properly, then lets him kiss her temple and her forehead as he pulls her into a hug, her arms gratefully slipping around his waist. Beth breathes out one long sigh, then inhales the earthy smell of sweat and grass and leather as she buries her face in the side of his neck. She lets his sturdy form hold up the weight of her, then melts around him so that there’s no distinction between where he ends and she begins. All the tension in her body drains away, replaced by a pleasurable ache like the throbbing tightness of muscles after exercise. 

He’s not a smart man, her husband. He’s no intellectual. But he knows the important things. He knows when to pull her in and when to let her go. He knows when she’s spoiling for a fight and the fact that she’ll turn on herself if she can’t find one. He knows the look in her eyes when she’s hurting, even if he doesn’t have a full picture of why it hurts so bad.

“Fucked up kinda world,” she mumbles against his skin.

“Wish I could fix it for you, Beth,” he whispers so quietly in her ear, it leaves too much silence for him to hear her heart break. She can’t help the way it hurts, nor the tears that spill out onto the thick strap of his old wife beater. 

When she mumbles, “Least we can fix it for them,” he doesn’t know half of what she means, but it doesn’t matter. He nods and says, “Okay,” and it means more to her than the promises on their wedding day. 

“Girl seems up to it,” he rallies.

“Yeah,” she sighs out an unsteady breath, “I liked her.”

“Woulda liked her even more if she wasn’t pregnant with the stall cleaner’s baby.” 

Beth chuckles, then pulls away from him, swatting him on the butt with her face cloth. “That all he is to you, huh?”

“Don’t push, baby,” he warns as she goes back to washing the day off her face, keen for the distraction. But there’s an edginess now where he’d once sounded so absolute.

“Okay,” she concedes, bending lower to splash water over her face with her hands, the faint black soot of mascara-laden tears darkening the sink before it drains away.

***

Beth finds relief in taking control of the situation. She’s old enough now to know the calls she needs to make and the people she can manipulate into silence. It’s Beth who arranges the appointment – and not before running a pretty thorough background check on the clinic. It’s far enough away that there’s no danger of anyone in the building knowing them personally but still close enough that the Dutton name holds power. 

None of it takes too long. Not for someone with the steely gaze of Beth Dutton on a mission. The family reputation doesn’t hurt either. 

The process of it all grants her back some sense of autonomy. It feels like rewinding a video tape and recording over her trauma. It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure with a different ending. 

She asks Halie if she’s sure so many times she can tell the girl is almost ready to roll her eyes, despite her deference to Carter’s guardian. It is merciful that the girl holds strong in her certainty. She only looks Beth in the eyes and thanks her with some verbal tailspin, lacing in new details about her college plans whenever she seems to sense Beth’s concern. Beth nods dutifully, grateful for the constancy of Halie’s decision.

She remembers vividly how she’d felt when it was her, the sharpness of the memories like cuts reopening. Too young, too weak. She knew she wasn’t ready to be anyone’s mother with more certainty than she knew her own name. The scars her own mother had left were still open wounds back then. No matter how much she loved Rip, he couldn’t heal that. Only time would do it. Even when she girlishly daydreamed about what their kids would be like, the pretty pictures in her mind were distant – five, 10, 20 years down the line. It was with him, always with him. But not back then, at that age, when they were still just two young, broken things with edges still sharp and jagged, not yet sanded down and rounded out by the texture of a life lived.

Beth doesn’t sleep well the night before the appointment. She never sleeps well, of course, but on this particular night, her eyes are still wide open when dawn begins to break through the mountains. 

It isn’t too often she stirs before Rip. 

With a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, a coffee in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, she walks out to the front steps to watch the day dawn. Alternating between hits of caffeine and nicotine, her thoughts drift somewhere above, between sheets of cotton clouds sprawled vast overhead, spanning from distant cool, dark gray puffs to fiery pink and orange and yellow streaks of light where the luminous sun begins to rise. It transforms before her eyes, transiting into ordinary daylight and clearing to blue skies by the time she hears movement inside the house. 

When she wanders back inside, Rip is making breakfast in the kitchen. As she walks past him to place her empty coffee cup on the counter, she sweeps her hand along the plain of his back, between his shoulder blades. Noticing the rigid tension beneath her touch, she moves to absently massage his shoulders a little, digging her thumbs in hard enough that she earns a low, satisfied groan. 

“Kid’s up,” he tells her, his voice a little hoarse like it’s still coming up from sleep. Beth fondly scratches her nails through the dark curls at the base of his neck. 

“That’s good. She’ll be here soon.” The boy probably didn’t sleep too well either, she thinks.

Rip only hums in response. He busies himself with the fried bread and she watches, because she likes watching Rip work. She takes pleasure in the way his brow furrows when he concentrates and the careful way his strong hands take care. 

Before too long, she comes to realize he’s only making enough for two. As if she shares the observation aloud, Rip comments, “He can make his own breakfast.”  

Inevitably, Carter wanders into the kitchen and immediately takes an interest in the contents of Rip’s frying pan. He listens for the sizzle of hot oil soaking its way through streaks of bacon and the scratch of the spatula against the crisping bread. Beth can tell he wants it more than her; in fact, food is the last thing she’s thinking about. It’s just as clear to her that Rip would rather throw it against the wall than feed this boy right now. 

Instead, knowing not to utter a word of complaint given the circumstances, the kid settles for a stale bowl of Froot Loops.

Somehow, for the first time all week, Beth manages to get both of them to sit around the table together to eat. Rip’s probably persuaded by the knowledge that watching the two of them eat fried bread, eggs and bacon is a more effective torture than total avoidance. 

In the stony silence at their breakfast table, waiting for the girl with the mousy brown braids and the baby in her belly to arrive, Beth’s thoughts fill with flashbacks as she pushes food around her plate. It’s the awfulness of waiting in this same house that takes her back there. The way she’d needed Jamie’s coldness, the absence of sympathy a mercy to her at the time. It felt easier that way, to be clinical and unyielding and entirely focused on fixing the problem. She couldn’t bear her own emotions, let alone confront anyone else’s. And yet, once she found herself sitting in that awful waiting room, feeling completely and utterly alone despite her brother’s presence there, she’d longed for Rip with such acute urgency it felt like a fever burning. Still, she waited without a tear or a word. She let the fever burn out, fire replaced by ice. 

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry about all this,” Carter musters in the heavy silence. The interruption is a welcome relief to Beth, bringing her back to the present. She gives him a vague, friendly smile, a gesture of understanding that’s sharply cut off–

“Sorry don’t mean shit now, kid,” Rip snaps at the boy. He clears his throat like there’s more he wants to say, but it never comes. Instead, he storms out without another look in Carter’s direction. He picks up his hat, then slams the door so hard that Beth feels the house shake. 

Carter looks at Beth. A deer in the headlights. 

“I’ll talk to him,” is all she can say, following her husband’s path with a rather more light-footed exit. Feeling the lingering chill of fresh morning air, she slips her jean jacket over her shoulders as she goes. 

Beth soon finds Rip standing beneath the tree she’s begun to think of as his. His thinking tree. It reminds her of him even when he isn’t there: so big and imposing, standing tall outside the family home like it’s watching over them. When the sun’s high in the sky, it casts quite a shadow. It had been a comfort to her growing up, that big old tree, the one constant of her life. Whenever she came home, it was the only thing that never seemed to change. Until Rip. 

Hidden by the dark shade that the large oak provides, Rip’s black ensemble camouflages him perfectly. If she weren’t so familiar with his hiding spot, Beth might not have seen him there, sitting against the trunk of it for a moment of private solace. It’s almost as if he was carved from it, the way he blends in like another ridge of bark. 

Beth walks across the grass slowly, her arms folded like armor across her body. 

He woke up angry. Quiet with her, snapping at the kid. 

It has her wondering what’s changed.

When they talked it through, he seemed okay with the plan. He’d accepted it. He made her feel like if back then she’d told him the truth, he would’ve made everything okay. Perhaps it’s different when it becomes real. There’s talking, but the doing is something different.

The long fuse she’d lit two decades earlier might finally be running out of cord. Despite the decisions she made 20 years ago, and her resulting infertility, she’s still ended up heading to an abortion clinic with Rip. With or without him. And maybe that changes something, even now. Maybe this was always destined to be what snapped them in two. 

“Scaring him off so he doesn’t talk to us anymore won’t help,” Beth points out gently as she comes within earshot of Rip’s secret spot, her eyes squinting into the sun until she takes a few more steps to allow the branches of the tree to shield her. 

“Might make me feel better,” Rip counters, looking off into the middle distance rather than meeting her gaze. 

“Well? Did it work?”

Rip turns his head toward her, the answer evident in the silence that follows. 

Beth edges closer, drawn into the intimacy inside the shade of the tree as she takes a study of her husband. His eyes are hidden by the curved rim of his hat. She can see the way he’s biting down on his toothpick, near-snapping the fine stick between his lips. “You’re still angry with him.”

“I’m angry with him. I’m angry with the fuckin’ world, Beth.”

“Some things never change then,” she says, a bittersweet fondness laced through the words. The more he echoes that teenage Rip she fell in love with, the closer she feels to being back in the before. She moves closer to settle beside him, finding space amid the tree roots to sit there. 

“It’s hurtin’ you,” he says, that fire behind his words fuelled by something different to what she’d been expecting. He doesn’t ask it like a question; he states it, an observation. It takes her by surprise. The thing that he can’t bear. The thing that makes him too angry to sit still and wait. The thing that’s hurting him, too. “Kid don’t know it, but he’s got you taking his girl to the damn clinic, cleaning up his mistakes and he’s got no idea–”

“Rip,” she stops him, putting her hand on his knee and nudging it fondly. With a dry, bitter laugh, she quotes his own words back to him: “Baby, I was made to go through hell.”

He looks up, tilting his head so that she can finally meet his gaze beneath the shadow of that old, well-worn hat of his. She finds all the answers in a single look, his eyes blown wide like he’s so angry he could cry for her. All because the kid did by accident what they’ll never be able to do on purpose. “How many years you been pulling away? ‘Cause you think I care about kids.” He clears his throat, then bows his head. “Never cared ‘bout anything but you, you know that? And he just goes and…” 

Beth gives a sad smile, her fingers reaching out to lift his chin once more and trace along the lines of his face. “That’s how they are. They don’t know how fragile it is,” she reminds him, dragging the pad of her finger over his eyebrow and down his cheek, as if feeling over the cracks of what she’d once broken. Her voice is dreamy and detached, the thread of her thoughts catching on sharp, twisted memories. “That’s how they get to be, till life eats away at them. Can’t blame ‘em for that.” 

“God knows I made some fucking mistakes, Beth, and he was always gonna make some of his own. But this?” 

“This ain’t the first time I felt like God was laughing at me, baby. Doubt it’ll be the last.”

“You forgive him too easy.” 

“I always was a soft touch when it came to brooding, angry strays.” It's the most direct she's ever been with Rip. He's like you. He's your boy. He belongs with you, with us. It lives in words unspoken.

Rip makes a gruff, throaty sound, as if barely capable of containing his irritation at her inference. His gaze wanders over the distant mountains, the scattered lawn chairs, and eventually comes back to her. She’ll forever wonder what might’ve happened if he hadn’t been looking her directly in the eye when he remarks, “Beth, I might not’ve been too careful but least I stopped short of knocking you up.”

She’s always been a masterful poker player, able to hide her tells behind easy repartee and flirtation. It’s just that usually when a poker face is required, she at least anticipates the game is afoot. She can brace for the lie and carefully prepare a measured facade. 

It’s an imperceptible flinch. It’s the color draining from her face. It’s the frozen pause, a fraction too long. 

The question pinches his brows together until it’s not really a question anymore. She can’t see it anyway, not once the fog of tears in her eyes has obscured her vision. They come so fast, she’s scared to blink, like if one starts to fall then it’ll burst the whole dam. Instead she stares blankly through the frosted glass outline of him. She never really needed sight or sound to sense him anyway. Their connection, their understanding of each other, exists in the unavoidable metaphysical.

When she does blink, clearing her vision at last, she finds him still staring expectantly back at her. “Beth?” 

She can’t tell a lie. Not anymore. No secrets had been their rule, their new rule, and this particular secret could hardly be considered a favor. 

“Beth,” he says again. This time the word is uttered sharply enough that she knows it’s final. 

“It’s not a conversation for today, baby,” is the best argument she can muster on short notice. 

“Seems like it is.”

She knows it’s cheating to fall apart. His weakness was always her at her weakest. It isn’t an avoidance tactic this time; it’s years of tension spilling free. It’s like a pinprick release, barely a word spoken, and her body wilts until she’s completely curled in on herself. It’s Rip’s instinct to wrap his arm around her, to let her hide herself inside his embrace, but the generosity of his comfort only adds to her guilt. 

“There ain’t nothing you could tell me about what’s past that can hurt us now,” he promises, with all the conviction of a man who can’t possibly imagine the shit she’s done in this life, his forehead pressed against the side of her head like it might fuse them together. 

She turns to look up at him from under her thick mess of bangs. “You believe that?”

“I do,” he replies, steady as the goddamn oak. 

Beth nods, tucking her bottom lip under her teeth and letting her teeth drag over it. She’s torn between trying to run away again, before Rip does, and trusting that he means what he says. She tries to ground herself to that little patch of earth under the shelter of the tree, remembering that her promise was to stay. She pulls her knees up close to her chest, squeezing her arms tight to draw them in, and lays her head against them. Mustering her strength, she wipes away the wetness still shining on her cheeks with the back of her hand, and warns him, “I got some big fuckin’ skeletons, Rip.”

His tone somber, eyes solemn, he says, “I don’t scare easy, honey.”

“No.” She smiles to herself. “No, I guess you don’t.”

“Give me the truth, Beth,” Rip presses, a hand stroking along the arch of her spine. It’s firm and heavy, soothing its path. She feels tethered to him, grounded in his touch. While he is tender with her, the promise of forgiveness endures. He asks for the truth like it’s a gift rather than a curse to share in. 

“We were kids. Same age as the two of them and more broken still.” Beth swallows. Rip surely knows what’s coming, but it feels different to give voice to it. She sits upright and looks him in the eye as she admits, “I lied to you. When I said the test was negative. I lied to you and then I tried to take care of it.”

His head tilts again to one side, eyes studying her intently. “That why I catch you lookin’ at me sometimes like you’re guilty as hell ‘bout some hurt I don’t even know about?” All those looks, those blanket apologies.

She puts an affectionate hand to his cheek for one fleeting moment, feels the warm rough of his dark beard pressed against her palm lines: head, heart, life, sun, fate. All lines lead to him. “That’s not all of it, baby.” 

“What’s all of it? Tell me all of it, then we can forget all of it.”

He says it like it ain’t no thing. 

“It’s not so easy to forget.” She breathes in deep through her nose, then lets the air blow out of her mouth like smoke from her morning cigarette. “I tried to forget, I really fucking tried, but…” Her voice breaks. For just a moment, it feels like a phone line cut off. 

He strokes his hand through her hair and she groans in embarrassment at her own fragility, the physiological responses of her body fighting with her fierce will. When the knot in her throat comes loose, she speaks again. “I missed you,” is the first point she comes to, the end of her sentence, though it’s still raspy and delicate. “Then I’d come home, and you’d fuck me back to life for a little while and look at me like nobody ever looked at me, like I hung the fucking moon.” She dares to glance at him, catching in his wistful eyes the sorrow of old memories – the nights she’d leave the moment it was over, quickly chased by mornings when she’d pack up to run away again. His inevitable punishment for the crime of loving her and showing it. “And I’d remember what I did to you, to us. And I’d leave again. Gone long enough to make me miss you so much that I’d forget how it felt when you looked at me… until the next time.” 

“If that’s what you been running from, you gotta slow down, baby. It ain’t nothing to forgive.” Rip draws in a long breath. “When I thought you were pregnant, Beth, I was as terrified as you.”

She weeps softly, the constancy of his forgiveness almost too much to bear. “I didn’t know where to go. I thought my dad would kick me out, or worse, kick you out. I didn’t know where to go.”

“You could’ve come to me, darlin’.” 

“You were just as lost as I was back then,” she reminds him, shrugging. “We were kids.”

Sixteen. Babies, really. 

They both look to the house, noticing Carter’s silhouette in the window of the only room with the light on. He seems to pace back and forth, then move out of sight again. 

“I went to Jamie,” Beth confesses, with the intonation of an apology, turning her attention back to Rip. The moment she says it, his mouth tightens. His jaw clenches, then releases. His shoulders twitch, like just hearing that name sets him on edge. Rip knows enough about Jamie Dutton to know that it isn’t good judgment, this isn’t a precursor to a happy little twist. Quickly, she fumbles for the words to explain it to him, and to herself.  “I thought he’d–he’d know where to go, what to do.”

She wonders then if the before and after with her brother falls into place in Rip’s memory. They were good once, Jamie and Beth, loyal enough to each other. The animosity came later. It came at exactly the same time that Beth started rejecting everything else in her life, making the shift a little harder to notice. 

Something hardens in Rip’s expression. He rolls his shoulders back. “What did Jamie do, Beth?” he asks with an unsettling calm, restrained fury permeating her brother’s name as if every letter of it is covered in kerosene. She only needs to light the match.

All too late, she knows it was a mistake to tell him. It had felt impossible not to, facing the prospect of walking herself back through the same steps as before from a different vantage point. Besides, fragile as glass, he’d seen through her anyway. A lie, an obfuscation, would’ve been unbearable on a day already so hard to bear. She had needed him to know her pain, to understand the full truth, in the hope that it could begin to set her free and remove that last remaining obstacle standing between them. But he loves her something wild, most of it gentle but plenty of it buck wild, too. Always has. A kind of love that makes a person crazy. 

She tries, feebly, to divert him away from the truth they’re circling: “Baby, it’s in the past.” 

She knows it’s a lie. It looms large over them even now, like the vines that twist around the tree, strangling it, weighing it down. It’s the past stretching into the present, infecting it with cruel, naive mistakes. 

Just as she knew he wouldn’t, Rip refuses to back down. “Beth,” he pushes her.

“I don’t want you to go anywhere,” she whispers, reaching out to stroke along his beard, like she already knows it’s some kind of goodbye. How would he ever be able to hear it and carry on the day like nothing’s changed? Still, she tries to shift his focus, her frayed voice managing to remind him, “The kid’s coming over. She’ll be here any minute and–” 

“Beth,” he echoes, his dark solemnity cutting through her rambling pleas. 

She winces.

The fixed determination on his face earns her surrender. 

“It’s why I can’t have kids,” she admits, at last. “The place he took me–”

Even through the flood of tears almost blinding her, Beth notices the snap. There’s a harsh line set between his eyebrows, a cold look in his eye, looking past her, like he’s not looking much at all but imagining someplace else. He tilts his head back, puffing out heavy breaths through his nostrils, balling up his fist until his knuckles turn white. 

Her hands go to the collar of his shirt, pulling on it, physically begging for him to say something, do something, stay. His silence frightens her – more than when he’s slamming doors, more than when he raises his voice, more than just about anything. 

“I’m gonna tear that motherfucker’s head from his body and feed him to the fucking wolves,” he says, so eerily cold and decisive that a chill runs down her spine. 

Using the pillar of the tree to steady himself, he stands up without warning. Beth’s quick to react as he purposefully strides toward the driveway, pulling him back with all the strength she has. 

“Rip, look at me, look at me,” she pleads, tugging on his hand. When he lets her turn him around, Beth reaches up to grab his face and hold him in front of her, gripping like she has the strength to keep him there. “You can’t kill him, Rip.” She squeezes her eyes shut, tears slipping through and weighing down her lashes. “He’s my brother. My dad… he won’t forgive you.” It’s not enough. John Dutton isn’t enough. She can see it. She can see that she’s asking too much but, with a sob, she begs him anyway. “He’s taken too much already, baby, please. He’d take you too. I know it. One last act, making damn sure I lose you.”

“That twisted son of a bitch ain’t your brother. He belongs in hell.” 

“He can’t hurt me now,” she promises Rip, like he can’t see the way that old hurt aches inside her and keep her awake at all hours. It’s weak. And Rip’s anything but. Rip was built to tear men apart, his name a prophecy. 

Rip covers her hands with his own and pulls himself loose from her grip. 

As he turns to walk away, her footsteps follow his trail and Beth changes tack: “Not now, not today. Just don’t do it today. I need you here,” she admits, the truth of it more acute than she wants to accept. As he gets further and further out of reach, she calls out, “Rip!” sharp enough to get his attention. He looks back over his shoulder to hear her say, “I need you.”

The truth of it hurts her. Beth Dutton never let herself need anyone, but Rip, that beautiful boy carrying a truckload of angst of his own, had never entered a fight he couldn’t win. 

He looks at her and, for a moment, a brief glimmer, she wonders if it might be enough. 

They’re cut off by the sound of Halie driving her daddy’s old Silverado down the rutted track that leads up to the house, the tyres crackling along the gravel as she approaches. The car radio is blasting some old pop-country song, the muffled sound of a plucky banjo providing a jarring backdrop to their scene. 

Beth knows she’s running out of time to stop him; she can see the cogs turning. For a man like Rip, it doesn’t take him too long to figure out the easiest way to end another man’s life. His eyes go dark and distant again, like he isn’t really present with her anymore, too busy thinking on how to make the last miserable moments of her brother’s life as painful as possible. She knows because she’s been there. She’s wandered to the darkest depths of her mind in pursuit of something, anything, that’ll feel like closure. 

It’s not that she wants to protect Jamie. It’s Rip. It’s them, their marriage and their life together: sad, beautiful, flawed, perfect. 

It’s killing for love that gets you caught. That’s when mistakes happen. 

“Baby, don’t,” she pleads with him. If he’d only look her in the eyes again, really look, he’d see: it won’t save her. She needs him with her, holding her hand through the flashbacks and reminding her where they are now, where they managed to get to despite Jamie. “I don’t think I can get through this shit without you.”

Not too far from them, Beth hears the faint squeak of Halie braking, the muffled music cutting off, then the opening of a car door. Footsteps on the driveway. The thud of the door smacked shut. The click of the lock. There’s the rubber kiss of the front door opening. A murmur of Carter’s voice.

“Baby,” she tries one more time over the white noise of life happening around them, stumbling after him as he makes off toward his pick-up. 

In seconds, with Beth giving chase, he pulls himself up into the driver’s seat and manages to lock the doors behind him before she can do a thing about it.

“Fuck,” she snaps as her bare hands smack against the window. As Rip revs the engine and begins to peel away, she screams, “No, no, no, no!” wildly against the glass pane, ignoring the sharp sting of contact clapping against her palm as she runs, stumbling, after the vehicle. 

It’s only a few yards before she surrenders, the speed of it impossible to fight. 

She’d misjudged the man’s temper, fooled as she was by the gentle words he’d spoken before her admission. He wasn’t ready to hear the sins of her brother; he was never going to be. She feels bitterly vindicated for her decades of silence, but it’s little comfort. She tastes bile coming up in her mouth like the purge had been a physical rather than verbal one. 

For a moment, she thinks of running back inside for her keys to chase him down. 

“Mrs Wheeler?” Halie calls out, interrupting the haze of Beth’s racing mind. It cuts through, innocent and scared and curious, and Beth remembers her responsibility to this girl she’s known only a few days. Some strange, unfamiliar maternal instinct snaps her back to the plan – the original plan, the plan that she’d architected without knowing what she’d be giving up to carry it on through. There isn’t time to do both: to stop Rip and help the girl. 

“You ready to go?” Beth says, forcing her way to composure.

Halie nods. 

Carter’s eyes look off into the distance, watching the dust still dancing through the air where the spin of the tyres has disturbed it. “Is Rip–?”

“Change of plans,” about covers it.

She hasn’t got time to assuage Carter’s guilt. She can see, plainly, because the boy was never much for deception, that he thinks it’s still him that Rip’s angry with. Nervously, he asks, “We’re still… good, though, right?”

Good’s a bit of a stretch, Beth thinks. “Just gimme a fuckin’ minute,” she tells him, pulling a cigarette out of the pocket of her jean jacket, searching deeper still for her lighter.

Halie looks at Carter like she’s searching out his read on the situation.

Just like Rip, he presses: “Beth?” 

“A minute,” she snaps, turning away from them to follow the boy’s gaze as far as the eye can see. The black Ram is nothing but a dot disappearing in the distance, some incongruous blot staining the spectacular landscape – an eyesore amid the beauty. Muttering only to herself, she adds, “Let me smoke this fucking cigarette.”

“Come inside,” Carter says to Halie, and Beth feels a sting at the embarrassment his voice carries. She hears him usher the girl indoors like he’s trying to pull her away to safety, like Beth is a fire and he’s afraid Halie will get drawn into her flames. 

But for the hum of an excavator engine down by the barn, Beth is granted a moment of quiet solitude, only briefly. She takes in a deep breath, feeling herself teeter on the cusp of falling apart. It’s like floating to the edge of a waterfall, staring down the drop, but not quite tipping over. She’s caught there, unable to swim back upstream but still not quite going under. 

She hears the unmistakably heavy thread of John’s footsteps walking out onto the front step. “I don’t think I wanna know.”

Beth doesn’t even turn at the sound of her father’s voice. She mutters, “Trust me, you don’t,” just loud enough for him to get the message. 

***

Her mind is racing, moving through scenarios faster than the Mercedes zips along the dirt road. There’s no room for her feelings today, not with Rip gone and the kids left behind with her, both looking to her like she’s got a fucking clue, forcing her to push every dark thought to one side for the time being. It’s the closest she’ll ever get to parenthood now, she figures, glancing at the pair sitting on the backseat like preschoolers she’s carpooling to nursery. Nothing on the radio, they just sit there in silence in the back of the car, holding hands over the middle seat while they stare out their respective windows. 

She tries to call him through the Bluetooth in the car. The relentless ring loops in circles like it’s waiting for her to go insane, filling the car with a greater sense of anxiety. No crescendo ever comes, the longer beats between rings nothing more than a tease. 

Beth knows he won’t answer the phone. Not a hope in hell. The man left hellbent on revenge, ain’t nothing some small talk on the hands-free is going to do to save them now. 

If she were alone, she would scream and shout. She’d let the tears blurring her vision fall freely. 

Instead, she digs deep and holds on, gripping the steering wheel like it’s Jamie’s neck. Her eyes fix firmly on the road ahead without taking in any of her surroundings. She follows the route the satnav gives her on autopilot, like if she allows herself to make a decision of her own, her hands might steer them in a different direction. A dangerous one. 

The start of their long journey to the clinic requires all the same turns that Rip would’ve taken. She pushes the thought away. When she veers off his trail, her hands twist hard at the wheel, but the choice is made. There’s just something inside of her that has to get the damn kid to the appointment. Some strange, fucked up part of her brain is convinced that if she can reach back through time and change it, make it safe for herself, then maybe that changes everything. Maybe it saves Rip. Maybe it saves her. Maybe it even saves Jamie, though he might truly be beyond salvation. 

She tries to shut herself off from thinking about her husband and her brother, imagining the confrontation, looking at the clock and wondering how long it would’ve taken Rip to reach him. She wonders if Rip would have thought hard on it, made sure to prolong it, or whether he would’ve lacked the self-control to hold back. 

In vain, she hopes he never gets there.

She hopes that somewhere along his long, miserable car ride, her pleas will bring him to his senses. 

She hopes and hopes and hopes, and before she knows it, she’s parked up outside a Planned Parenthood, frozen, staring straight ahead out of the windscreen. 

“Beth?” She hears Carter’s tentative voice and she can tell from the way he says it that they’ve been sat there an awfully long time, waiting on her. 

“Mm? We’re here,” she replies, like they don’t already know as much. 

Beth wants to be sick. She could open the car door and vomit onto the tarmac. 

She pulls down the sun visor and wipes under her eyes in the mirror. In the reflection, she notices Halie looking at her. “You’ll be okay, kid. You will,” she insists. One of us has to be, she manages not to say aloud.

Beth braces herself. She allows for one more glance down at her phone, a blank lock screen lit up with that dreamy meadow, before leading the kids inside. Steel in her spine, she walks into the building with her shoulders back and head held high, hands tucked into the pockets of her burnt orange shearling coat. Her eyes are outlined by a smudge of black kohl, her jaw set and thrust forward, her mouth pursed enough to make her cheekbones as sharp as her temper.

The moment Beth wanders in, the receptionist seems to tense at the sight of her. She’s leaning forward to listen even before Beth begins to speak.

“We’ve got an appointment. 11.30, Halie–” 

“Ah, yes,” the woman replies with an over-keen, nervous energy, her eyes moving from Beth to the teenagers standing awkwardly behind her. “Please take a seat and she’ll be called through in a few moments.”

“Got it.” Beth nods and turns her attention to the waiting room. 

It’s quiet, but not like the blissful silence of late nights out on the roof. Too quiet. It’s like everyone’s afraid to speak, their eyes fixed to the floor like they’re fighting with themselves not to look up. A few of them chance little glances, their curiosity piqued by the conspicuous Dutton presence, a head full of gossip the perfect distraction from their own stress or guilt or impatience. 

The only three seats available together are a trio of plastic chairs that look like they’ve been brought in from a school assembly. Beth leads them over and feels the bend of the seat beneath her, the metal feet of the chair scraping along the floor from the slight movement of her sitting down in it. 

Halie opts to sit next to her, with Carter on the other side. 

It’s an interminable wait, as if designed to be one last test of will. 

Whatever restless energy Beth feels brewing inside her is mitigated by the distraction of Halie’s nerves beside her. The teenager taps her foot like there’s an uptempo song playing in her head, the heel of it bouncing up and down and up and down so furiously that the chair squeaks beneath her. She begins to bite at a hangnail as Carter squeezes the other hand, and Beth feels the urge to reach over to take the free hand away from her mouth before she makes herself bleed. It’s at least a distraction from her own uneasiness and every thought of Rip. 

Eventually, Beth reaches over and picks up a copy of Cosmopolitan that’s been abandoned on another seat. It’s six months out of date, with a cover star she doesn’t recognize. Still, she passes it along to Halie, who dutifully pretends to take an interest, flipping through the pages at a speed that suggests not a word of it is cutting through the nerves. 

Beth leans back and puts an arm around the girl. A silent gesture of solidarity, the passing over of all the strength she has left in her. It doesn’t feel like much, but it’s enough to prompt Halie to turn and offer a tight, grateful smile. 

As they both turn their heads back so that they’re facing forward, Beth’s gaze catches on the scolding look of a stranger across the room. She feels the way Halie tenses. “Nothin’ like the judgment of your fellow sinners lookin’ for someone else to look down on,” she mutters under her breath, for the benefit of Halie only. “Fuck ‘em, baby. You do what you gotta and fuck ‘em.” 

When the girl’s name gets called, Beth rubs her back briefly in the beat before she stands up. You’ll be okay, kid.  

“You’ll be here, won’t you?” Halie checks, looking over her shoulder as she follows the nurse away. 

Carter nods as Beth feigns a smile. 

When she’s gone, her empty seat leaves space between them. It’s a gap as big as a canyon. Too vast to reach across. She waits to see if Carter will slide into the empty seat, but he stays where he is, a lost look on his face as he stares off in the direction Halie left. 

Beth puts her hand in her pocket and reaches in for a cigarette. 

“Please,” Carter says, without even glancing her way.

Please don’t do it. Don’t embarrass me. Don’t make a scene. 

Lesson learned: parenthood stings like a bitch. His words aren’t delivered sharply; it’s just a weary plea that makes her feel like he, too, has had enough of her shit. He doesn’t mean to hurt her and that’s why it cuts so deep, his rejection just one more thing to add to the pile.  

Beth surrenders the cursed cigarette, letting it fall back into the depths of her coat pocket. She sits back in the chair, then sits forward again. Her hands begin to scratch at a cut on her leg she’d got from shaving, just beneath the hard bone of her kneecap, a tiny, rough scab that she tweaks with the edge of her nail. Once it bleeds, a single deep red drop trailing down her shin, she feels the urge to press on the wound to see how much she can make it sting. 

In this airless, miserable room with only the boy who might hate her after all for company, she feels herself beginning to dissociate. She longs to. She wants to escape the confines of her body and float above, fading gently from the room like smoke. There’s something so visceral about the smell of the place that keeps her trapped inside her corporeal form, the mustiness of a school changing room combined with an unpleasant chemical smell.

While Halie had been there, she had something to do. Purpose. A performance to give.

All that’s left after is Carter, looking like he might shatter at any moment, and a half-empty room filled with women who’d rather be anywhere else. She contemplates an exit, for the sake of fresh air and the privacy to feel outwardly what’s caught in her throat, but there’s the boy to consider. She stays tethered to the plastic chair for his sake and endures the awfulness of waiting, still and powerless and alone. 

Of course, when Carter abruptly stands and mutters, “I’m gonna… get some air,” suddenly taller than she ever remembers him being, there’s no invitation for her to join him. 

“Don’t go far,” is all she finds to say. 

And then she’s truly alone. Alone and stuck, feeling like the outdoors is already claimed as his private solace now. Any attempt to leave would be an intrusion. It’s his baby, an embryo not much bigger than a baked bean. Not hers or Rip’s. It’s his to mourn, and his girlfriend to worry about. She reminds herself over and over as she feels herself tipping over the edge, descending to the crash. Memories pour over her in a flood so quick, so lonely, she feels herself drowning in them – all those nights lost to tears, until it hardened her completely: the pain like no period she’d ever had, the look in his eye when she broke his heart, the moment she realized the truth of Jamie’s plan, the isolation of staying shut up in her room in agony, the longing, the wondering, the guilt. 

She doesn’t realize she’s crying, sobbing out where everyone can see, until she hears the creak of the chair next to hers. His big, hulking form doesn’t quite fit, his leg rubbing against her own where it spills out from the seat. As she feels the squeeze of his big, warm hand reaching out for hers, it brings her back. 

He’s here. She breathes out.

The warmth of his presence is immediate, the comfort in his touch healing. He made it, hand a little bloodied but here. 

It is dawn breaking through the mountains. It is bourbon on her tongue. It is Valium for a long flight. 

He can’t possibly know how much it means to her that he came.

As soon as she feels his hand slip into hers, she dissolves in his arms. For a moment, it doesn’t matter what he’s done. Nothing matters but the fact that he showed up to hold her hand. The aching loneliness of sitting on her own is replaced by the comfort of him, the way he imbues every touch with a tenderness she knows she doesn’t deserve. For a moment, she only clings to him, grateful for the miracle of it.

“Is he dead?” she asks under her breath once she feels brave enough, her eyes studying the splotches of red on his hand, the bruises beginning to bloom.

“No,” he replies, an uneasiness to his answer. “No, I, uh… ended up taking it out on an abandoned old Chevy. Didn’t get there before I turned around.”

“Thank you,” she manages to say, not for the violence or the promise, but for doing as she’d begged and showing up. “Thank you for being here.”

“I’m late,” Beth hears whispered in her ear as he cradles her head against him. “20 years late.”

“No.” She straightens up so that he can see the conviction in her eyes. “You’re right on time.”

Beth is not, and has never been, a self-conscious person. When she rises out of her seat and slides into Rip’s lap, folding around him and tucking her face into the curve of his neck, she doesn’t care about the eyes of the room on her. They are – now unashamedly so, as if no one’s seen a bloodied, old cowboy rolling in here lately, his presence unsettling all the room but Beth. 

She weeps silently over this singular, precious thing returned to her safe, grateful for any small chippings of joy and relief that might be carved from their beautiful, messy life together.

“The girl okay?” he asks, and she loves him for it. She loves him for the rest, too. For not killing Jamie today. For wanting to. For coming here and holding her while she falls apart. 

“She will be.”

He twists his head to get a good look at Beth’s face, sliding her bangs out of the way so that she’s got nothing to hide behind when he asks, “And you?”

“Better now.”

“I shoulda been there. To stop it, or to hold your damn hand.” She hears the regret in his voice, an emotion rare for a man who so steadfastly refuses to look too long to the past. He finds her hand once more, intertwining their fingers like maybe it makes up for something, something long lost. He rests their locked hands in his lap as he looks her, his intense gaze adding to the weight of every word. “I can’t change what’s done. I know that. S’why I turned around.” 

Beth smiles a weak, sad kind of smile before hiding her face in his neck, head resting against the hard line of his shoulder. He kisses the side of her head, a sweet, innocent peck, and says, leaning down close to her ear, “You comin’ here today, to help that girl… I think you’re the bravest fuckin’ woman alive.”

She can’t find a thing to say to that, only holds onto him like he’s her reward.

When Carter comes back and finds them together, there’s an unmistakable fragility about the boy. He looks pale, his skin like eggshell. A gust of wind could knock him over. There are tears sitting in his eyes and maybe it’s the surprise – the relief – of seeing his parents reunited, or the incubator of tension that is the clinic waiting room, or the days on days of trying to hold it all together for this girl he likes so much. 

He moves to settle in the seat beside them. Beth and Rip watch, but neither of them rushes to speak. In the silence, in that great big space they leave for him, he says, “I know it’s the right thing, but…” Carter shakes his head, like the end of his sentence is lost to him. 

“I know, kid.” Rip helps him quickly, his arm wrapping the boy inside a sturdy embrace, and his eyes squeeze shut like he’s feeling all of it too, his jaw tensing. “I know.”

With Beth curled into the other side of him, Rip pulls the boy in close and lets him soak his tears into the shoulder of his jacket. He absorbs the boy’s shakes with steady strength as Beth strokes her hand over the teenager’s hair with gentle affection. 

It’s a strange feeling to watch her husband and her son mourn the same loss, their own versions of it sitting side by side some 20 years apart. Strange, too, is the way it solidifies their family before her eyes. Rip is processing their child that never was while accepting the boy as his own son. That’s how it feels to Beth, at least, watching the restrained warmth play out between these two people she loves. 

Eventually, once his emotions have evened out a little more, Carter mumbles something into the thick black denim of Rip’s jacket. Rip releases him enough for the boy to ask again, “Please don’t tell her,” through a snotty sniffle. 

“We won’t,” Beth promises him with the same gravity she made her vows with, “but, baby, you can. Ain’t no shame in feeling some kinda way about it. Long as she knows you support her. And you’re here, doing that.” 

She dares to meet Rip’s eyes, imbuing each word with new meaning. 

***

Rip never again reminds her that Carter is not her son after that. 

In fact, when Rip calls him ‘son’ that night over a bowl of spaghetti in the Dutton dining room, he catches Beth’s eye across the table like he’s making sure she heard it. And when Beth says, “It’s good, that we’re back together, eating as a family,” she leaves him in no doubt that she heard him. She turns to their guest and reassures her, “Now, Halie, you can eat as little or as much as you like. I promise I won’t take offense.” 

The girl, with a blanket still wrapped around her shoulders after hours spent curled up on their couch, lifts the corner of her mouth to a slight smile and gives a half-hearted nod. She even manages to laugh when Carter asks Beth, “Why would you take offense? Gator cooked it!” 

“I suggested it,” she points out. 

“It was a good suggestion, sweetie,” John chimes in, like he wants the whole debate over with, as Rip hums his agreement, reaching over to give Beth’s hand a brief squeeze.

“A little birdie told me it was Halie’s favorite.” Beth winks at the girl next to her. She looks sleepy and a little paler than normal, but well enough, considering. Beth finds peace in it, that there can be such an undramatic end to such a tumultuous day. It had seemed impossible and yet, here they all are, gathered around the table like normal families do it. 

Maybe other, normal families aren’t sitting in the aftermath of an abortion and a near murder, but the Duttons were not destined to lead a pedestrian life. 

For one rare evening, they manage to survive an entire family dinner without incident. They get through the entirety of dinner, plus dessert: a key lime pie, topped with whipped cream. 

After everyone’s finished eating, Rip excuses himself to go check on things down at the bunkhouse. He so rarely spares himself a day’s leave, the notion of leisure time a foreign concept to the man, so Beth can sense that it’s unsettling him to go even a few hours out of the loop. He’d left Lloyd in charge of the ranch hands, but given the frequency with which problems tend to arise around the place, there would certainly be things to discuss. “Won’t be long, honey,” he promises her in a whisper before his parting kiss. 

His departure prompts John to retire to bed, while Carter and Halie make their way back to the couch. Beth, meanwhile, uses the quiet as an opportunity to grab a bottle and a glass from the drinks cabinet. She sneaks out while the kids are distracted with each other, making her way out to her favorite spot: up on the roof, peaceful as can be. 

How many nights has she drowned her sorrows up here, the stars her only witnesses? 

How many times did Rip sit beside her on these cool roof slats and look at her long enough to make the world stop?

Out in the country, the stars shine bright and big, scattered across the darkness like a map of the whole spectacular universe laid out before her. There’s nothing like it in Salt Lake, nor any of the cities she’s ever lived in. Polaris, always, but not the rest of it. It’s a secret that belongs to the rural landscape, one to remind her of her profound insignificance in the face of this vast, wild world. On its own, each tiny white mark in the night sky is barely anything, but together she sees the paths and patterns emerge – sparkling beauty laid against total blackness. 

Years of not sleeping have formed a strange bond between Beth and the night sky, her foe and her friend through every phase of the moon and every season of her life. Wherever she found herself in the world, she would spend nocturnal hours looking at that same sky and remembering this rooftop. Nothing in her whole life has ever felt as magical as lying propped against Rip’s body, seeking out those little bursts of light. It’s a whole world built for two, everything faded to black but them and their stars. 

Even now, she lets her eyes dance over the constellations and gives herself to the night, savoring the fresh, cool breeze against her skin.

Once she hears the Ram driving back up to the main house, it doesn’t take Rip long to find her there. He knows her patterns the way she knows this sky. Once he climbs up and joins her, giving a few more groans of exertion than she remembers from previous nights like this, she feels a sense of completeness. He’s here, he’s still here, he’ll always come back here – even if they’re not as young as they used to be. They’re young enough and they have each other; it’s enough light for her to find a path for them.

Beth smiles fondly over her shoulder as Rip negotiates the precarious angle of the roof. “Carter okay?” she asks him as he cautiously takes each slanted step. 

“Yeah, he, uh, set himself up on the couch, gave her his bed for the night.”

“We got plenty of beds,” she points out, feeling a pang of concern for the boy’s back. Her first guess is that it’s Rip finding a new way to punish the kid, but there’s enough warmth in Rip’s words, fondness even, to indicate some other reason. 

Rip reaches her, bending down to shift into a comfortable spot at her side, resisting a smile as he says, “I think he’d rather act the hero, baby.” He smooths his hand over her back and it invites her closer, prompting her to pass her glass to him so he can take a sip.

Beth can’t help beaming, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “That’s very sweet.”

Rip groans, of course, but it lacks any real derision. He’s playing his part, earning a gentle elbow to his side from Beth, and she can see a smile on his face despite his best efforts to suppress it.

“Don’t act like you wouldn’t have done the same,” she teases him, cozying into his side and soaking up his warmth. She lifts the blanket she’d brought out with her so that it covers his feet as well as hers. 

“Mm,” he hums, low and gravelly, into her hair, punctuating it with a kiss to the crown of her head. He pulls her closer, his hand settling on her hip inside the warmth of the thick, woolen blanket.

“He’s ours, you know.” She settles her head against his shoulder. Up here it feels safe to say it, with the stars as her protection. “He’s our son.”

Rip stays quiet a moment longer than the tempo of their back-and-forth allows. Just a beat too long. When he does reply, with a warm and teasing, “God help us,” he sounds so entirely surrendered to the idea, she wonders if it had been only the weight of it that gave him pause. The grateful squeeze she gives him in response is nothing compared to how it makes her feel: like there are new bursts of light in the constellations. 

She sinks into the shape of him, letting his body heat envelop her. She can’t help but yawn, years of exhaustion catching up with her in the comfort of his arms. It’s as if her body finally feels safe enough to let her sleep, but she fights it to hold onto their moment a while longer. 

“Tired?” Rip asks.

“Mmm. Long, shitty day.” She pulls on the lapel of his jacket and he looks down at her. “How’re you doin’, baby?”

“I still wanna kill him, if that’s what you’re asking me.”

Beth lets out a near-endless deep breath. “Welcome to the last 20 years of my life,” she retorts, though it’s too sad to be funny, bitterness overpowering the humor she’d intended like stale beer washing away the sweetness of her favorite bourbon. After a long silence, heavy with the melancholia of her regret, Beth musters the courage to say, “It’s okay if you’re angry with me too, Rip. I lied to you. And maybe if I’d made some different choices, you’d be somebody’s daddy right now. I’d understand if you never forgave me for that.” 

Rip's eyes wander over her skin like he's memorizing the features of her face the way Beth learns the map of a Yellowstone sky – full of admiration, and more than a touch of awe. She knows before he speaks that his words will grant her more grace than she deserves, each syllable imbued with the kind of love and care that takes years to craft. “I’m angry… about what happened to you, but I ain’t angry with you, Beth.” He lets out a weary sigh of his own, passing the glass of whiskey back to Beth like he knows she’ll need a sip to steel herself. As she drinks, he says, his eyes looking up at the view, “Anyway, ‘ccording to you, I am somebody’s dad right now.”

Beth grins against the rim of the glass, teeth knocking against it. She turns her head with her smile fixed in place, careful to show him what his words mean to her.

Rip’s brow furrows like there’s more to say, a line forming at the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry I didn’t protect you then. I wasn’t there when you needed someone.”

Beth places a gentle hand over his lips and shakes her head, eyes closing to hold in a wave of fresh tears. “You were there. Today. When I needed you. You were there,” she reassures him, the tightness in her throat returning. The urge to diffuse the intensity of the moment comes on strong, as it often does for Beth in moments of profound solemnity, and it prompts her to add, in a lighter tone, “I want you to know I appreciate you getting through the day without killing anybody.”

“You’re welcome,” he says, the words warmed by a dry wit he only ever shows to Beth. She gives a true, full-bodied laugh when he reminds her, “There’s always tomorrow.” 

Beth can’t resist the urge to kiss him, her love and gratitude and relief spilling into it without restraint. She tilts her face at just the right angle so that it won’t knock his hat but, as he leans in, Rip takes it off like he won’t risk a single thing getting in their way. Her grateful fingers slide roughly through thick curls as she follows their slow, tender opening gambit with a far more eager, passionate second act, and she can taste the whiskey on his tongue, feels the soft friction of his beard teasing against her skin. 

When they come apart for the sake of oxygen and that alone, Beth rests her forehead against his, their minds meeting in this magical place above all life and its responsibilities. 

“You know, maybe it’s worse than killing him,” she wonders aloud, in the peaceful silence that follows. 

“How’d you figure that?”

Beth looks up as she takes his hat from him and places it right back where it belongs. “He’ll spend the rest of his sad, miserable life terrified that someday you will,” she posits while busying her hands with adjusting the hat until it’s back at the perfect slant. “And if there’s one thing I know about Jamie, it’s that he’s a pathetic, paranoid little fuck. All I ever had to do was mention the idea and he’d start sweatin’. Besides which,” she considers, the cruel point of her humor sharpening as she thinks of her brother, “if you had his life, wouldn’t you wanna kill yourself?” 

“I might still kill him yet,” Rip warns her, but she can tell he’s considering her argument. She can’t deny that there’s something so much simpler about tearing the man limb from limb instead. “If he so much as looks at you the wrong way. If he gives me one more fucking reason.”

“Okay, baby,” Beth says easily, the way other people might reply to what’s for dinner. “Just don’t get your ass hauled down to county jail.”

Rip gives her a sideways glance as if wounded by the implication he’d be so foolish. As if he might not have been just that clumsy about it if it happened in the heat of today. 

“So…” She pours herself another glass from the bottle beside her. “How were you thinking you’d do it?”

“Slowly,” he says, unfazed by the macabre nature of her question, before adding, “I got some ideas. To make sure it hurts.”

“Oh yeah?” After another mouthful of whiskey, she brushes a hand over his cheek fondly. “Maybe you can tell me about them, from time to time. Morbid little fantasies to occupy the mind.”

Rip laughs this hearty, warm chuckle, looking at her like even the darkest recesses of her mind endear her to him. When the light rumble of his amusement quiets, she nestles into his side once more. Her fingers weaving through the poppers of his shirt, fingertips pressed to the wife beater beneath and feeling the steady rhythm of his breathing, she admits, “I wanted that with you, Rip – kids, the whole nine yards. You would’ve been a good father.” The whole boring life, always destined to be a fantasy. “I wanted it so badly.”

He resists the opportunity to joke about the notion of mini-thems running about the place, the chaos that would ensue, the havoc of little humans with her instincts and his temper. Instead, he’s gentle with her, like he too can feel the tap-tap-tap from the other side of the looking glass. That other lifetime, all its unique pains and all its unfamiliar joys. “I know you did, Beth.”

“I am happy with what we have,” she insists, before pressing her lips together – wanting those words to linger a moment longer. “It’s just… a strange, vaguely unsettling feeling to miss somethin’ you never had. Or to wonder about it, anyway.” 

“Beth, this life, with you… I wouldn’t change it.”

“Honey, I’d call you a masochist but–”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“No,” she replies fondly, “but only a masochist would fall in love with me.” 

His face tilts like he’s studying a painting, seeing if his view of it changes with the angle. “You’re pretty easy to love.”

“Now I know that’s a lie.” She turns away from him just to catch her breath, but he draws her hair back where it blocks his view of her face. His two fingers move it as if lifting away a curtain, letting it tuck behind her shoulder so that he can see, at least sparkling in profile, the tears she’s holding back.

“No,” he insists, soft as the night breeze tingling over her skin. He brushes the back of his hand over her cheek, soaking up those tears before they even have a chance to fall. “Easy to love, just hard to keep.”

Eventually, when she feels brave enough to look at all his love straight-on, she says, “You’ve tamed wilder things than me. Why’d you never try and make me stay?”

Rip looks away, staring up at the stars, smiling to himself like there’s something obvious that she’s missing. “Love ain’t about making anybody do anythin’,” he tells her, shaking his head slowly. Maybe it seems obvious to him, but it never really occurred to her to think of it that way before. “Baby, I want you to be happy. Who am I to tell you that’s with me?” 

Happy? She imagines it in flashes. Rip standing in his kitchen making her breakfast, even though he already ate. Rip turning the damn cattle pen into their dancefloor. Rip gazing at her on the cusp of saying three little words. Rip straddled between her legs, laughing with her on the front porch. Rip fucking an orgasm out of her before the sun comes up. Rip’s eyes finding hers across a room. Rip coming home, picking her up and carrying her up the stairs without a word. Rip’s voice, low and rough, scratching out her name in the middle of the night. Rip riding over to her just to say hello. Rip and Carter sitting at the table eating her Hamburger Helper. Rip weeping at her father’s letter. Rip searching out her perfect meadow. Rip, Rip, Rip.  

“It is, you know. You’re about the only thing in this miserable life that ever showed me what it’s like to be truly, madly, deeply happy.” She watches him for a smile but his face stays serious, a sober look about him like he’s too caught up in the sadness of ‘only’ that he can’t hear the gratitude pouring out of every other word. She finally gets her wish when she teases, “Which is pretty fuckin’ crazy considering you’re such a grumpy motherfucker.” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replies, grinning.

Beth bites her lip, a little shyness coming over her. His brazen, open affection feels overwhelming; it always did. “You’re kind of a miracle, is all,” she tells him, quieter. 

He looks back at her like she’s crazy. She might be, but if she is, it’s not for this.

“No, I’m serious, baby.” She lightly swats his knee where she has her hand resting. She downs the rest of her drink, then puts the glass down, letting it balance in a gap in the roof slats beside the bottle. “People talk about unconditional love and it’s always some bullshit. Parents with their kids, or lovesick fuckin’ idiots. But you–you spent your whole life loving me, and for what?”

“Just the act of loving you was enough for me, Beth.”

Beth shakes her head, but smiles to herself. “And you want me to believe you’re not a miracle?”

“All the shit I’ve seen, and the lives I’ve taken, threats I’ve made…” He’s somewhere else for a moment, putting himself back in places he never wanted to go in the first place just to make his point. He doesn’t stay gone long before she feels his hand slide up around her waist, squeezing the curve of her side, as he says, “Loving you, baby – that’s the only thing makes me feel human some days.”

She understands now the sadness of ‘only’, and why when she’d said her version of the same sentiment, he hadn’t heard all the love breathed into the words around it. For Beth, she considers him – just him, in all the world – more than she deserves. When she thinks of Rip, though, the thought that he might only have this flawed, wild love between them keeping him tethered to humanity makes her uneasy. He deserves a whole, big family to wrap him up. He deserves to feel the immense loyalty of his friends, and the respect of every soul living on this damn ranch. He deserves legacy, and the promise of being a cherished memory for generations to come. He deserves more than she alone can offer him. 

That’s what she’s thinking of when she dares to ask, “You think maybe Carter could have that effect too?” 

With a rumble of faint amusement, Rip says, “You ain’t never gonna stop until you get your way, are you?”

“Maybe someday you could love him, baby.”

“Beth…” He winces like perhaps he already regrets what he’s about to say. “You won that fight a long time back now, honey. Alright?”

“I thought so,” she admits before bringing him close again, stroking her hand across his cheek, letting her fingers tangle gently through his coarse, dark beard. “I love you, baby. I love you so much it damn near kills me. I would stay on this roof with you until the stars fall out of the sky.” 

Rip kisses her deeply, his mouth set free like a bolted horse, and she catches his hat in her hand just in time. He tastes like whiskey, like sweet oak and alcohol. As he guides her into his lap, moving them so that she’s straddling him face-to-face rather than twisting into his kiss, his hands wander to slide up her leg beneath the hem of her dress. She feels his cold touch trailing goosebumps along her skin until he’s at her waist, one finger hooked beneath the hip of her panties. She doesn’t feel the chill, even where the skirt of her dress is riding up, the blanket knotted at their feet, entirely forgotten. The comfort of him, his hot breath meeting hers and the thrill of his affection, is enough to keep her warm. 

“You’re in me, like this fucking whiskey coursing through my bloodstream,” Beth says breathlessly, picking up the bottle at her side, letting it slosh as she gesticulates with it. When she puts it back down, she points to her chest, pressing hard at the center of it. “You’re part of my soul. Ain’t no getting rid of me.”

“Beth, when I say there ain’t nothing you could do to make me walk away, I mean it.” He kisses her again as if to seal the promise before following up with an addendum: “Now, I’d rather you didn’t try testing me, ‘cause I ain’t too young these days and it’ll put me in an early grave, but if you do, I’m not goin’ anywhere.” 

“You’d never leave this motherfuckin’ ranch,” she says, sure as the stars shine each night.  

He looks at her, his hands moving to frame her face, holding it with the kind of gentle affection that used to make her run, and he smiles. His eyes shine in the moonlight and it’s so beautiful it makes her constellations seem mediocre by comparison. “No. I’d never leave this motherfucking ranch.”

She knows, hears in the warm timbre of his voice, that he’s not really talking about the ranch.