"And now you're sure."
I spread my hand wider across her stomach. Felt the familiar warmth of her, the weight of her, the life we'd made together pressing back against my palm.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm sure."
She fell asleep first, the way she always did. I lay awake a little longer, the way I always did—not anxious, just present. Taking stock the way I took stock of the ranch every morning in the dark, checking that everything was where it was supposed to be.
Millie, asleep against my side.
My daughter, quiet now, waiting.
The ranch beyond the window, three generations of limestone and cedar and stubbornness, still standing.
Mine to protect. Mine to pass on. Mine in all the ways that mattered, which turned out to be different ways than I'd thought when I'd walked into a fertility clinic six months ago with a problem and a deadline and no idea what I was actually looking for.
I thought about a waiting room. A sunflower print. A woman in a marigold mask doing math that didn't add up, folding and unfolding a spreadsheet like she could make the numbers work if she just kept at it long enough.
She'd made them work.
I closed my eyes.
Outside, the creek ran in the dark, the way it always had, the way it always would.
I slept.
Epilogue
MILLIE
It turned out there was a learning curve to breastfeeding.
Nobody had mentioned that part. The books mentionedlatchandletdownandsupply and demandin the cheerful, confident tone of books written by people who had presumably figured it out, and the lactation consultant at the hospital had been lovely and thorough and had left me with seventeen pages of notes that I had read four times and apparently retained none of.
Bea was a week old and hungry and frustrated and I was sitting up in bed at two in the morning trying to remember if I was supposed to compress or not compress and whether the pain meant the latch was wrong or just that everything was new and tender, and I was approximately forty-five seconds from crying about it.
Gage appeared in the doorway.
He'd been doing that—materializing whenever something was wrong, some rancher's instinct for the herd that apparently extended to his wife and daughter. He took in the situation in one sweep: me, Bea, the seventeen pages of notes on the nightstand, my face.
He came and sat on the edge of the bed.
"Talk to me," he said.
"She won't latch. Or she latches and then—" I gestured vaguely. "It's not working. I don't think anything's coming out. The consultant said sometimes the milk takes longer to come in and I just—" I stopped. Pressed my lips together. "I'm not going to cry."
"You can cry."
"I'm not going to." Bea made a small frustrated sound against me and I felt the specific helplessness of not being able to give her what she needed. "I just don't know what I'm doing."
Gage was quiet for a moment. He looked at Bea. Looked at me. Then he said, carefully, "Can I try something?"
I looked at him. "What."
"Something that might help." He met my eyes, steady. "You can tell me to stop."
I had no idea what he was suggesting and also I had been awake for most of the past week and I trusted him completely. "Okay."
He shifted closer. His hand came up—warm, careful—and cupped my breast with the same matter-of-fact competence he brought to everything on the ranch. Not sexual. Or not only. He pressed gently, a slow firm compression toward the center, and I felt something shift.
