“Thank you,” she said. “For today.” A pause. “For all of it.”
She said it simply, without qualifying it or diluting it or reaching for the dry edge she sometimes kept ready for moments like this. She said it straight, and she held my eyes when she said it.
“Anytime,” I said.
She looked at me a beat longer. Then she took the porch steps one at a time, her hand on the railing, and pushed the door open and went inside.
I stood on the porch, and set the bags down, holding the railing to take a moment. The frost on the grass caught the morning sun and held it, white and even, the shadows of the fence posts stretching long and thin across the ground. The mountains were visible beyond the property line, close and clear in the winter air, the kind of close they only got in weather this clean. I stood there with my hand on the door frame and let the morning be what it was.
The image from the monitor was still there when I closed my eyes. Not faded, not softened, but still right there: the curve of the spine, the insistent flutter of her heartbeat, the small profile of her face that had no idea yet what was waiting for it or life she’d lead. A girl named Peanut, named Hope, named both.
I had held her mother’s hand in that room and not been able to say a single useful thing, and that was the right choice, and I knew it.
The word from the night before was still in my chest too, sitting quiet where it had sat since she’d said it without thinking, we. It had rolled naturally off of her tongue. We. A word that meant so much, for such a small word. She had spoke about her future, Hopes future, and she had looked at each one of us and said we. She knew we were meant to be, even if it hadn’t fully registered yet.
Chapter Eight – Lila
The barn floor had a patch near the second stall that I knew about and had known about all winter, a place where the frozen mud had heaved and set at an angle that made the ground uncertain underfoot, and I had been navigating around it every morning with the automatic care of someone who has memorized the particular hazards of their own property. My breath came out in slow clouds above the pitchfork handle. The barn smelled the way it always did at this hour, animal warmth underneath the cold, hay and manure and the particular sweetness of the horses shifting in their stalls, and I moved through the familiar weight of it the way I moved through most mornings now, which was by not thinking about the weight.
My back had been at me since I woke. Not the sharp, radiating kind, but the low, insistent kind, the kind that set up housekeeping and declined to leave. I had taken two careful trips already from the hay pile to the far stall, forking fresh hay in under the trough, and my right boot had found the patch on the first trip and I had corrected and kept moving. On the second trip I was carrying more than I should have been, the pitchfork loaded because it was faster and because I had a list that morning that did not accommodate slower. My attention was on the stall door latch, which had been sticking all week, and not on my feet.
My boot found the patch.
The rest of it happened very quickly. The angle of the floor took the boot sideways, and my weight was already committed forward, and my left hand grabbed for the stall post and found nothing but cold air, and then I was going down, not a stumble with a recovery but a full, committed fall, landing hard on my left side, the impact traveling up through my hip and my shoulderand my head, which caught the edge of the frozen ground with a sound I felt more than heard, and then there was a moment of nothing at all.
Then there were voices.
Then there were faces above me, three of them, framed by the barn ceiling and the pale winter light coming through the east slats. I blinked. Cole, Rhett, Wade.
Cole’s eyes were doing something I had not seen them do before. He dropped to his knees beside me, his hands hovering above my shoulders, not gripping, but hovering, and his voice came out low and controlled and with a quality in it, a thin crack running through the steadiness of it, that I did not have a name for.
“Don’t move,” he said. “Just, don’t move yet.”
Rhett was at my other side, crouched close. The grin was gone. I had not seen his face entirely without it before and the absence of it was startling in a way I didn’t know how to file, his face pale beneath the tan, the laugh lines still there but doing nothing, his hands flat on his thighs and the knuckles of them white.
Wade had his phone out already.
“I’m fine,” I said. My voice came out reasonably level, which I took as a good sign. I put a hand to the floor and began pushing upright.
“Don’t,” Cole said, and his hand came down, steady and firm, onto my shoulder. Not rough but not negotiable either. His palm was warm through the canvas of Ethan’s coat.
“It was just a slip,” I said, and then I stopped talking, because when I turned my head to look at Cole directly, the barn took a slow, deliberate rotation around me and the base of myskull sent a line of pressure forward behind my eyes that was not the sort of thing you argued through. I lay back. My throat moved.
Wade was already talking to someone on his phone. He had it on speaker and his voice was even and factual. He gave my details and the circumstances of the fall in the barn, head struck the ground, unconscious briefly, over eight months pregnant, and the last part landed in the cold air of the barn and sat there.
The doctor’s voice came through the phone, flat and competent and unhurried.
He asked specific questions, and Wade answered the ones he could and put the phone closer to me for the ones he couldn’t. I answered them. My voice was level. I gave each answer in the flat, functional tone I used for things that needed to be gotten through.
Then the doctor said: “You need to be seen. But more than that, you need to stop.” A pause on his end, the pause of a man choosing between diplomatic and direct and choosing direct. “You’re eight months pregnant. If you keep pushing like this, you’re going to put yourself and that baby at serious risk.”
The barn was very quiet around the phone.
I did not say anything. I lay on my side on the cold barn floor with Cole’s hand still steady on my shoulder and the prescription of his words settling over me, and I did not reach for the deflection I normally kept within arm’s reach. I did not say I was managing, or that the ranch didn’t run itself, or that I appreciated the concern but I had it handled.
I said nothing.
Cole looked at Rhett over me, a brief look, and Rhett looked back, and neither of them said anything either.
