He moved to the floor without urgency, his knees on the old boards, and he looked up at me with the steady, dark-eyed attention he gave to things he had decided entirely. His hands were warm at my hips and his head bent toward the curve of my belly, not to Hope directly, but just above, the swell of the upper hip where the skin was tender and close. He closed his mouth there with the same gentleness that was simply constitutive of him, not chosen for the occasion but native to the man, and the bite when it came sent warmth spiraling down through the curve of my belly in a direction I had not expected, inward, spiraling, reaching.
I was there’s and they were mine. It was how it was meant to be and I’d known it from the first moment I saw them. I just wasn’t ready to admit it. “Your daddy would be happy for us Hope,” I said in my mind.
Hope kicked, almost like she shared my thoughts.
She kicked once, a clear, distinct movement against the inside of Wade’s palm where it had come to rest over the peak of my belly, and I felt the kick and felt his palm receive it and felt something move through me that I did not have a word for and did not try to name. His eyes came up to mine over the curve of her. He did not say anything. He pressed his palm more fully against the kick and held it there, and his eyes were warm and quiet and completely certain.
The metallic warmth of all three marks sat on my skin, tender in the way new things were tender, the bruise of them still forming, each one at a different point, back of the neck, below the jaw, upper hip, and together they sat in me the way the sound of a chord sat when all three notes were held at once. Not painful. Substantial. Real in the way of things that had been decided.
Outside, the horses were restless in the late afternoon way they went restless when the light was going, the low, hollow sound of hooves on packed dirt in the near stall, the soft snort of the mare two doors down, a tail moving against wood. The sounds came up through the loft floor as vibration as much as sound, the life of the barn below us going about its business, indifferent to what was happening in the warm, hay-smelling air above it.
I could not parse the words, not all of them. Low voices, one and then another, layered together in the enclosed space, and what I received was not the content of the words but whatlived beneath them, the quality of something offered without condition, the particular resonance of a sound made by people who meant it down to the structure of it. I felt it in my chest below the collarbone. I felt it in the backs of my hands, in the marks on my skin, in the weight of Hope turning one slow, deliberate circle beneath all of our palms.
I pressed my forehead to Cole’s shoulder.
His arm came around me without a word, and I closed my eyes against the worn cotton of his shirt and felt Rhett’s fingertips trace the line of his mark at my jaw, light, following the edge of it, learning it. Behind me the warmth of the loft held the bars of late gold light and let them go slowly toward dusk, and Wade bent forward and pressed his lips to the curve of my belly. A long, still kiss, given to Hope in the same unhurried way all the serious things had been given tonight, fully and without qualification.
Their combined scent was in the air around me, around all of us, wound into the hay and the old wood and the warm skin smell of the afternoon, and I breathed it in and felt the word arrive in me without drama or announcement: pack. Not something I had chosen the way you chose a word for something. Something that had already been true and had simply taken its time becoming language. I held it there in my chest alongside the marks and the warmth of them and the particular, deliberate kick of Hope against all of our hands, and I let it be the whole of what I needed to know right now.
The last of the gold went out of the slats above us.
The barn went blue at its edges the way barns went blue in the January dusk, the cold reasserting itself at the threshold while the warmth stayed, for now, in the enclosed air of the loft. Cole’s arm tightened slightly. Rhett’s hand settled flat andwarm at the back of my neck, and nobody said anything, and the evening came on slowly around all four of us, and I did not move.
Chapter Twenty – Lila
The tea had gone cold while I wasn’t paying attention to it, the ceramic still warm in my hands from habit rather than heat, the pale amber surface of it motionless while I watched the sky over the Sawtooth range make its decision. It had been making it for the better part of an hour, the light going from the ordinary flat grey of January to something darker, the specific pewter of a sky that had weight behind it. The wind came across the fields in visible sheets, lifting the surface snow and sending it skimming low and fast over the frozen ground, and the bare cottonwoods along the fence line whipped sideways in the gusts, their branches making a sound I could hear through the old glass even with the stove going.
I set the mug on the counter without drinking from it.
Cole was visible through the window, moving between the barn and the supply shed with the purposeful, ground-eating stride he used when there was real work to do and a finite amount of time to do it. He was hauling sandbags, clamping the storm shutters on the outbuildings closed, his breath coming in hard white bursts that the wind took the moment they left his mouth. On the porch, Rhett moved along the railing testing each lantern, lifting and shaking each one to check the fuel, the cold turning the skin across his cheekbones deep red. His hat was pulled low and his usual easy set to his shoulders had been replaced by something economical and focused.
Wade appeared in the kitchen doorway.
Snow dusted his shoulders and the front of his coat, already beginning to melt against the kitchen warmth. He looked at me first before he said anything, the way he always did, that full, unhurried assessment, reading the room before he addedanything to it. “Animals are secured,” he said, his voice low and even. “Barn doors are double-latched.”
I nodded. My eyes had already gone back to the window.
My free hand had moved to Hope without my deciding to move it, palm flat against the weight of her, the familiar pressure of her settled and present beneath my palm. She was quiet this afternoon, the way she sometimes went quiet when I was standing still and the house was loud around me. Outside, the wind gusted hard enough that a loose shutter somewhere on the east side of the house knocked twice against its frame.
The first serious snow started to fall.
It came in driving curtains rather than the ordinary fall of individual flakes, thick and horizontal, cutting visibility across the fields down to nothing within thirty seconds. The mountains disappeared behind it. The cottonwood trees became grey suggestions. My breathing changed without my telling it to, something in my chest pulling inward and tightening, going shallower by degrees. I pressed my fingers flat against the glass. The cold bled through immediately, sharp and clean and particular, spreading up through my knuckle joints in the way cold moved through old glass.
Ethan’s coat moved, I looked at it for a moment. Ethan would always be part of me, part of my history, Hopes history. I was lucky that Cole, Rhett and Wade saw him as part of my past, the past that shaped me and bought our beautiful baby girl into our lives. We would keep Ethan alive for Hope, make sure she knew her daddy. Make sure she knows all her daddy’s. We’d bring him to life with memories, photographs, old videos. He’d have life, even if it weren’t in a physical sense anymore.
I moved to the kitchen table and sat down. Outside the window the snow was solid white now, the kind of snowfall thaterased the landscape in sections. I got up again, went to the counter, stood there with my back to the room, and came back to the table.
Wade had not moved from where he’d settled against the counter, arms loosely crossed, his eyes on me. Not managing me, not preparing a correction for whatever I was doing wrong. Just watching, with the particular quality of attention he brought to things that hadn’t asked for his intervention yet. I could feel it across the room the way you felt a fixed point when everything else was moving.
The back door opened.
Cole came in first, the cold coming with him in a wall. He pulled his work gloves off in three deliberate tugs and dropped them on the counter, his face reddened from the wind. Rhett came in behind him, snow across the brim of his hat, and set one of the lanterns on the kitchen table with a solid, final sound. Neither of them spoke immediately. The kitchen contracted with the four of us in it, warm and close, the windows rattling in their frames against the pressure of the wind outside.
I had stopped moving. I was standing with both hands gripping the back of one of the kitchen chairs, my knuckles pale against the wood, staring at the pattern of wear on the table’s surface. The chair had belonged to Ethan’s grandmother. I had sanded it twice. I knew every mark in it. I looked out of the window again, the snow was getting worse, wind picking up.
Wade said, quietly, “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” I said, trying to calm my
