Page 68 of Wild Then Wed
“You’re not overstepping,” she says, waving me off. “It’s fine. Honestly, I don’t know. It’s not really how I pictured my life going, you know?”
I nod again, slower this time. “Yeah. I get that.”
“I’m only twenty,” she says, pressing the heel of her hand to her forehead. “I’m still in school. I’ve got…plans, I guess. I wanta career. Maybe my own training program someday. A life, you know?”
She nudges me gently with her elbow, a tired smile tugging at her mouth.
“You’d be great at that. The training program,” I say, and I mean it.
She’s smart. Quick. She notices the small stuff most people miss—the flick of a tail, the shift of weight, the things a horse is saying even when it’s not moving at all. And she’s got this natural brightness to her, like she could get a stallion to follow her just by asking nicely.
Anna sighs. “That’s why I’m giving the baby up for adoption.”
I blink again. “Oh. I didn’t…I mean—wow.”
She gives me a look that tells me she’s used to people not knowing what to say.
I rub my hands over my thighs, suddenly very aware of my own silence. “The dad doesn’t want to be involved?”
At that, she rolls her hazel eyes and lets out a long, dramatic groan. “God, no. He was this tourist I met at the Lucky Devil over the summer. A one-night stand. I called to tell him I was pregnant and he said, and I quote, ‘good luck with that,’ and then hung up on me.”
“What a bastard.”
“Right?” she says, laughing now. “But it’s okay. I found an adoptive family already. They’re great. Like, really great. So…”
She shrugs again, but there’s something steadier behind it this time. Like she knows what she’s doing, even if it’s not the life she mapped out for herself.
“I’m proud of you,” I say, meaning it. “For doing what’s best for you. And your baby. That’s not easy.”
Anna’s smile softens, grateful and a little tired. “Thanks.”
Then she shifts, nudging her toe against the dirt. “What about you? Did you ever picture yourself having kids?”
And there it is. That question. That landmine. I stiffen—just barely. It’s a reaction you learn to mute after enough times being asked the same thing, after enough times of having to find a version of the truth that doesn’t feel like being sliced open.
“I did,” I say quietly.
And I did. I wanted it more than anything. I was the little girl carrying baby dolls around the ranch, giving them names, swaddling them in torn-up pillowcases.
When Ridge and Sage were babies, I’d follow my mom around like a shadow, begging to help with bottles and diaper changes, climbing into their cribs just to be near them.
Back then, I thought it was a given. That someday, I’d have that too.
And then came the pain.
It started as cramps that knocked the wind out of me. Then nausea. Bleeding that didn’t stop. Days where I couldn’t stand upright without seeing stars. Years of being dismissed, misdiagnosed, told it was normal for my age.
It wasn’t. By the time they found out how bad the endometriosis really was, it had already taken too much.
I was nineteen when I had the hysterectomy.
I remember everything about that year. The sound of the shower echoing off the tile while I cried hard enough to gag. The cold of the barn floor against my cheek when I couldn’t pull it together long enough to finish the feedings. The weight of my mother’s hand stroking through my hair while I laid in her lap, not saying anything, not asking for anything—just trying to exist through it.
I cried more in that one year than I have in the rest of my life combined.
It wasn’t just about the pain. It was what it took from me. What it left behind. The knowledge that no matter how much Iwant it—no matter how deeply I love, or how fiercely I show up—I will never have children of my own.
That sort of loss doesn’t come with a clean break. It just folds itself into the quiet parts of your life and waits for moments like this to remind you it’s still there.
