The pre-dawn dark was thinning. The eastern ridge had a line of pale gold along its crest, the kind that said morning was coming whether we were ready for it or not, and the ranch was coming awake around us—distant low of cattle, the creak of the barn door, the sounds of a place deciding it was time to get to work.
I looked out at it. The pastures stretching silver toward the tree line. The main barn with its weathered siding catching the first weak light. Beyond the pines, the Blackwater River glinted, a thin ribbon of movement against the stillness. All of it. Every acre. Every fence post and grazing cow and patch of winter grass that Sterling Callahan had decided, against considerable odds, was worth protecting.
I thought about Sterling coming back down that road. The truck pulling into a gravel drive that belonged to us. A yellow nursery with white trim. A porch with a decent view where a man could sit with his boots up and pretend to read something tactical while actually watching his family move through a life he helped build.
I knew it. The way I knew things that mattered—all the way down, no argument. Sterling was going to come home. We were going to build something permanent on land that belonged to us.
I was going to be insufferably smug about it for the rest of my life, and Sterling would pretend to be annoyed, and wouldn’t be, not really, and I was already looking forward to it the way you look forward to something you’ve wanted for longer than you’ve admitted.
The gold along the ridge thickened. Morning arrived, patient and certain, and the bunkhouse held us the way it had been holding us for months—warm from the wood stove, solid in its bones, a temporary shelter on the way to something that wasn’t temporary at all.
Caleb’s breathing had steadied against my chest. His hands were warm where they gripped the back of my shirt, and I held him there while the light changed and the ranch woke up and the gravel road stayed empty, for now, because some things were worth waiting for and Mitch Pruitt had always been good at waiting when the thing at the end of it was worth the wait.
Sterling Callahan was coming home. We were building a house. The nursery was going to be yellow.
I already had the hat picked out for the porch.
Chapter Twenty-One
~ Caleb ~
I stood in the framed-out master bedroom with both hands pressed flat against my belly and counted the days. Six weeks and four days since Sterling left.
I hadn’t stopped counting.
The morning air carried the smell of fresh-cut pine and sawdust so thick I could taste it, and somewhere overhead, Macon and Burke’s crew were hammering something that sounded both permanent and impatient.
The babies nudged against my ribs, insistent and rolling, the kind of movement that had started as flutter and graduated to something with opinions. My hand went sideways by instinct, reaching for a body that wasn’t there, and closed on empty air.
“Counter space is non-negotiable,” I said to the empty side of the room.
“I’m right here,” Mitch said, and he was, two feet away with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, surveying the framed walls with the proprietary satisfaction of a man who had argued for every square inch and had the nail-gun calluses to prove it. “You’ve said that four times this morning. I’m beginning to think you have a counter space agenda.”
“It’s not an agenda. It’s a requirement.”
“It’s an obsession.”
“Those words mean the same thing when you’re pregnant.”
Mitch’s grin went wide and slow. “Fair.”
I moved through the framed rooms the way I did every morning, my hands on my belly like I was introducing the babies to their future, one two-by-six at a time.
The floor was plywood underfoot, still tacky with morning dew, and the walls were just studs and headers, open to the skyin a way that made the whole structure feel both temporary and inevitable.
A house in the making.
Our house.
The words still felt strange in my mouth, like a language I was learning one room at a time.
Mitch walked with me. He always walked with me. His boots made a different sound on the plywood than mine did—heavier, more deliberate, the stride of a man who had spent his adult life covering ground and saw no reason to change his pace just because the ground was currently made of half-inch plywood and liable to give him a splinter.
The kitchen doorway was just a rough opening with a header beam, but I stopped there anyway. Had to. Every morning. “The counter space,” I said, pointing at the wall where the counter would eventually live, “is correct.”
“You measured it three times,” Mitch said.
“I measured it twice.”
