Tuesday she came to find me at the stable in the afternoon. I saw her coming across the property from fifty yards out and I put down what I was doing before she'd even reached the door.
Wednesday Neto needed the fence line finished on the north boundary and I got it done in record time because Millie had texted me a single word—done?—at noon and I'd read it three times and worked like a man with somewhere to be.
She'd been waiting on the porch when I came back.
We didn't make it inside.
Thursday I pulled her into the utility room off the kitchen when my mother and father were having lunch twenty feet away, her face tipped up to mine, laughing and then not laughing, her hands twisted in my shirt while I worked her over quiet and thorough and felt her try to stay silent and fail. Felt her bite my shoulder when she came. Stood there afterward straightening her dress and then walked back out to the kitchen table and ate lunch like a man who had his whole life in order.
My father had looked at me over his sandwich.
I had looked back.
He'd said nothing. Gone back to talking about limestone.
Friday she came into the barn while I was doing the evening check and I looked at her and she looked at me and neither one of us said anything, and afterward we sat in the hay in the long evening light and she leaned against my shoulder and I kept myhand flat on her stomach and thought:it's already done. I can feel it. She's already mine and she's already carrying it and everything that comes after this is just the world catching up.
I knew that was irrational.
I didn't particularly care.
The thing was—I'd started this with a reason. A clear, practical, documented reason, the kind I could explain to a lawyer or a judge or my own skeptical brother. The land. The inheritance. Arlo's claim and the clock ticking and the arithmetic of it all. I'd thought about it in those terms for months before I'd walked into that clinic, had it laid out clean and logical in my mind.
That was gone now.
I couldn't locate it. It was like trying to remember why you'd gone into a room and finding you didn't care anymore because something better was happening in the room. Every time I reached for the original reason—the land, the heir, the arrangement—I found Millie instead. Her laugh. The way she felt in my hands. The way she'd looked at the creek and saidyou can feel how old it islike she'd always known that and was just now saying it out loud.
The breeding wasn't about the land anymore.
The breeding was about her.
It was aboutminein a way that had nothing to do with inheritance and everything to do with the fact that I wanted to watch her belly grow. I wanted to be the reason she glowed. I wanted to put a hand on her stomach in six months and feel something move and know I did that, I made that, she let me.
I wanted it with a ferocity that would have scared me a month ago.
Now it just felt like information about myself. True and settled and not going anywhere.
Then a delivery truck showed up on the property.
I had no idea what they were up to, but it sidled up to the cottage and through the goats. I was halfway there on horseback when I saw Millie come out to greet them—clearly, she’d expected them—and go back inside.
And I couldn’t resist.
I went in.
She was standing at the kitchen counter unpacking a massive box, and she glanced over her shoulder at me with a smile that had something sheepish underneath it.
"Don't say anything," she said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to."
I came to stand next to her and looked into the box.
There was a wedge-shaped pillow with a diagram on the packaging that I looked at for a moment before I understood what I was looking at. A small box of something called preseed. A soft little silicone cup in a drawstring pouch. A black box with a picture on it that made the contents fairly self-evident. And at the bottom, still mostly wrapped in packing paper, something larger.
I lifted the packing paper.
