Page 41

“Then I’ll listen to nothing.”

I put my hands in his hair and tip his face up, and he’s smiling. Not his smug little half smile. A real one. Wide and slow and completely stunned.

This big, rude, arrogant man who told the night watchman “not yet” and made a cattle trader walk out of the harvest fair is on his knees on my kitchen floor, grinning up at me.

“I stood in that forest for four hundred years, Hattie,” he says, low. “Every spring, I watched the birds make nests. The deer have fawns. Every living thing around me made something new.” His thumbs stroke slow over my belly. “I never thought I’d get one.”

That’s it. I’m done. I’m crying so hard I can’t breathe, and I get down on the floor with him, and he pulls me into his lap, and we just sit there in the middle of the morning, me crying, him laughing, his hands on my belly and my face in his neck.

“I’m gonna get so big,” I hiccup.

“You’re going to be beautiful.”

“I’m gonna be big and beautiful and I’m gonna want pickles with honey every single day.”

“I’ll buy every pickle in the valley.”

I laugh so hard I snort. Then I lean back and look at him. His big grin. His soft eyes. His big hands on my belly, like that’s where they belong.

“Rowan,” I say. “For real. Is the baby gonna be wood?”

He thinks about it very seriously.

“Maybe a little.”

“A little? What’s a little? A wooden toe? A wooden ear?”

“Some grain, maybe.” He shrugs. “Good strong bones.”

I stare at him. Then I look down at my belly. Then I look back at him.

“Well,” I say. “Auntie Bess is gonna lose her damn mind.”

Right then, somebody knocks on the door.

We both freeze.

“Hattie?” Auntie Bess calls. “Baby? I brought you more pickles.”

Twelve

Chapter Twelve: Rowan

I open the door.

The old woman is standing on the step with a jar of pickles in her arms. She looks at me. She looks past me at Hattie, sitting on the kitchen floor with her hands on her belly.

Then she looks at my hands. Which are also on Hattie’s belly. Because I followed Hattie to the door on my knees, and I’m not letting go.

The old woman’s mouth falls open.

She drops the pickles.

The jar hits the step and rolls off into the lavender, and Auntie Bess makes a sound I’ve only ever heard from a hawk. A high, piercing shriek that sends every bird in the meadow straight up into the sky.

“MARIGOLD!” she screams, turning around and running. “MARIGOLD, I WAS RIGHT!”

Hattie puts her face in her hands.