Chapter Thirteen
Miriam woke Grace up by shoving her wet fist into her nostril.
It served as an alarm clock of sorts, though Grace would’ve preferred one that didn’t come with baby drool and a fingernail up the nose.
She peeled the tiny hand off her face, sat up on the ground, and every bone in her spine popped in a chain from the bottom to the top like somebody cracking their knuckles in slow motion.
I’m sorry, little one. You shouldn’t be in the cold like this.
She’d have to think of a way to get Miriam somewhere warm and soon.
The tent, somehow, smelled worse in the morning.
That mildew-and-river-mud scent had deepened overnight into something closer to wet dog mixed with old potatoes, and the canvas sagged so low on the left side that it nearly pressed against her shoulder.
Through the gap in the flap, gray light leaked in, the thin kind that meant the sun hadn’t cleared the ridge yet.
Miriam grabbed a fistful of flannel and tugged.
“I know, I know. You’re hungry.”
The bottle. Right. Except the bottle sat in Jonah’s rucksack, and the rucksack sat outside by the dead fire. Even cooling for eight hours after the fire had died, the odds of the milk being any good ranked somewhere between slim and laughable.
I’ll figure it out.
She always had. Back in New York, she’d stretched a half-cup of flour into three meals by mixing it with water and frying it on the stove lid because the actual stove had broken, and Jonah hadn’t gotten around to fixing it. A person could make do with almost nothing if they’d had enough practice.
So. Breakfast.
She tucked the baby into the sling, pulled her boots on without lacing them, and ducked through the tent flap.
And stopped. Logan Foster knelt in the dirt next to a ring of fresh-stacked kindling, blowing on a curl of smoke that licked up between two pieces of split pine. Just there. In front of the tent. On his knees, in the clearing, like he’d sprouted out of the ground.
His horse stood tied to a low pine branch about thirty yards back, still saddled, which meant he’d ridden hard and recently. Dust on his trousers from the knees down. His hat hung on the saddle horn.
He looked up.
Those pale blue eyes hit hers across the clearing, and the smoke curled between them in a thread that broke apart in the breeze.
Grace crossed her arms, or tried to. Miriam occupied most of her chest real estate, so the cross came out more like a one-armed hug on herself, which probably undercut the effect she’d aimed for.
Her heart was hammering. She hated that, hated that he could still make her pulse kick up when she was supposed to be angry with him.
Logan sat back on his heels. “Mornin’.”
“Mornin’.”
The fire popped. Miriam squirmed against Grace’s collarbone and made that pre-fussing noise, the one that came about forty seconds before the full wail, like a kettle building steam.
“I brought milk.” Logan nodded toward a canvas sack beside his knee. “Fresh from this mornin’. And some biscuits. They ain’t great. Pa made ’em, so... prepare yourself.”
“You rode all the way out here to bring me biscuits your father made.”
“And milk.”
“At dawn.”
“Before dawn, actually. Left when the stars still showed.”
“How did you even know this was our—”
“I checked.”
“You…” She tightened her arm across herself. The baby grabbed a handful of flannel, his flannel, and yanked. “Whatever. If you came out here to tell me—”
“I’m sorry.”
Two words, and every thought in her head went quiet.
Logan stood up. Brushed the dirt off his knees. Took one step toward her and then stopped, like he’d hit a wall only he could see.
“What I said to you yesterday... about the ranch bein’ mine and you fittin’ where we agreed...” He worked his jaw. “That ain’t what I believe.”
“You said it.”
“I did. But it ain’t even close to what I believe, and I said it because I got scared, and when I get scared I build fences, and I built one right between us, because that’s the only thing I know how to do when the world stops makin’ sense.”
He looked like he hadn’t slept. That shouldn’t have mattered to her as much as it did.
“You ain’t hired help, Grace. You ain’t a housekeeper, and you sure as hell ain’t a piece of furniture I can move around when it suits me.”
He swallowed, his throat bobbed, and the words that came next sounded like he’d had to drag them from somewhere deep.
“You’re family. You been family since the night you named that baby after my mother, and probably before that, and I just... I couldn’t see it because I had my head so far up my own backside I needed a lantern to find my way out.”
Grace bit the inside of her cheek.
Because here was the thing. Part of her, the part that’d spent twelve hours in a tent on the cold ground smelling mildew and listening to coyotes, wanted to stay mad.
Wanted to let him twist. Make him work for it the way she’d worked for every scrap of good she’d ever gotten in her whole life.
With Jonah still asleep, she had the time for it before he started badgering her to forgive.
But another part of her, the one that’d pressed her nose to the baby’s hair last night and reached through the dark to a ticking clock miles away...
That part just wanted to go home.
And she hated that. Hated how fast the anger thinned when he stood there looking at her with those blue eyes and that hair in his face and dirt on his knees from building a fire she hadn’t asked for.
“You told me to leave.” Her voice wobbled at the edges like a plate balanced on a fingertip. “You stood in your yard and told me I could go, and you meant it, Logan. Don’t stand there and pretend you didn’t.”
“I meant it. Every word.” He stood up. “And I been sick over it since the second you walked ‘round that bend.”
“Good.”
“I deserved that.”
“You deserve worse.”
“Probably.”
Miriam chose this exact moment to let out a sharp cry, the kind that meant the forty-second warning had expired and the full storm had arrived. Grace bounced her in the sling and shushed against the top of her head, and the baby’s fists balled up tight inside the blanket.
“She needs that milk,” Grace nodded toward the canvas sack. “If you’re gonna apologize, you can apologize and pour at the same time.”
So he did.
He pulled the bottle from the sack and brought it over. When he held it out, their fingers bumped on the glass, and neither of them pulled back for a second that stretched longer than it should’ve.
Then, Grace took the bottle and tipped it to Miriam’s mouth. The baby latched on and sucked with that desperate urgency she always brought to morning feeds, like she’d spent the whole night convinced nobody would ever feed her again.
“There you go, little bird. Easy now.”
She wanted to believe him. That was the terrifying part. Every sensible bone in her body told her to keep her guard up, and every other part of her was already halfway to forgiven.
“Come home.”
Logan said it quietly. Almost too quietly, with the creek running and the birds going, and Miriam gulping at the bottle. Grace might’ve missed it if she hadn’t already known it was approaching, the way you knew rain approached by the smell of the air before a single drop fell.
“Come home, Grace. You, Miriam, and your brother. All three of you.”
“My brother.”
“Your brother.”
“The stranger you tackled in the dirt yesterday mornin’.”
“That’d be the one, yes.”
She looked at him over the top of Miriam’s head. She didn’t know what her face was doing, and she didn’t trust it. Something about him made her want to hand him the baby and the fight and every wall she’d built in the last two days and just be done with it. She didn’t.
But she wanted to.
“You said you didn’t want him on your land.”
“I said a lot of things yesterday that I’d like to take back and burn in that fire right there.”
“Why?” She frowned. “What changed your mind?”
Logan rubbed the back of his neck. The gesture pulled his collar sideways, and she caught the edge of a bruise along his jaw where Jonah had connected, already turning that yellowish green of a day-old mark.
“I read your letter last night. The one you wrote answerin’ the ad.”
Oh. That letter. The one she’d agonized over at the kitchen table in New York, writing and crossing out and rewriting until the paper nearly wore through.
Jonah sitting across from her with his chin on his fists, suggesting words she’d rejected and ones she’d kept, both of them huddled over that single page like it held their entire future.
Which, it turned out, it had.
“Mason gave it to me after supper. And I read it, and I...” He shook his head. “You wrote that you know what it means to hold a family together. That—”
“I remember what I wrote.”
“Well, I didn’t treat your people as my own. Your brother came to my door, and, instead of welcomin’ him in like I would’ve wanted anybody to welcome Mason or Thomas, I put him in a headlock and told him to get lost.”
“Yeah.”
He squared his shoulders. “So, I’m fixin’ that. I’m offerin’ him work. Real work, steady pay, and a spot in the bunkhouse. If he’s important to you, then he’s important to me, and that’s the end of it.”
Miriam pulled off the bottle and burped.
Timing. This child had timing.
“I missed it.” She said it before she could talk herself out of saying it. “The house. The clock. Your father’s chair creakin’ at supper. Mason’s terrible jokes and Thomas pretendin’ he ain’t writin’ poetry when we all know he’s writin’ poetry.”
Logan’s mouth tugged sideways.
“I missed the chaos.” She shifted Miriam higher on her chest. “All that noise and arguin’ and people bumpin’ into each other in the kitchen, and last night it just...”
“Grace?”
She shook her head. “It’s too quiet out here.”
“Yeah, well.” Logan kicked at the dirt. “I missed your cookin’. Pa tried to make stew last night, and I’m pretty sure it violated several laws.”
“That bad?”
“Thomas compared it to somethin’ you’d use to patch a wagon wheel.”
“Lord.”
“Mason tried feedin’ his portion to Brutus. Poor dog walked away.”
A laugh broke loose from her chest.
She hadn’t expected it, hadn’t planned for it, and it came out too loud for the clearing, startling a bird out of the nearest pine. But it kept going, bubbling up like that creek down the hill, and Grace’s eyes watered.
“The dog? The dog walked away?”
“Tail between his legs. Like we’d insulted him.”
She laughed harder. Miriam fussed at the jostling, and Grace pressed a kiss to the baby’s forehead and rocked her until she settled.
The laughter tapered off into something warm that sat in her chest alongside the ache that’d lived there since yesterday, and the two of them just sort of.
.. coexisted. The ache and the warmth. Side by side.
Behind her, the tent rustled.
Jonah stumbled through the flap with his hair going in four directions and one boot on and one boot off, squinting against the light like a mole surfacing into noon.
A crease from his rucksack pillow ran across his left cheek, and he’d buttoned his shirt wrong, the bottom half hanging an inch lower than the top.
He stopped when he clocked Logan.
Every line in his body pulled tight, and he shifted his weight onto his back foot, which happened to be the bootless one.
“Uh.” Jonah glanced at Grace. Then at Logan. Then back at Grace. “Mornin’?”
Logan turned to face him.
For a beat, the two men just looked at each other across the fire. Jonah’s hand drifted toward the bruise on his own forehead, the one Logan had put there, and he pulled it back down.
Grace watched them and didn’t breathe. Everything she wanted was standing on opposite sides of that fire, and if either one of them said the wrong thing right now, she didn’t know what she’d do.
“I owe you an apology.” Logan crossed the clearing and stuck his hand out. “I’m Logan Foster. I’m your sister’s husband. And yesterday I acted like a damn fool.”
Jonah looked at the hand. Then up at Logan’s face. Then over at Grace, who nodded once.
“Jonah Linton.” He took Logan’s hand. “And you did hit like a mule.”
Logan smiled. “Your sister tells me you’re a hard worker.”
“My sister’s been lyin’ for me since I broke Ma’s good vase when I was six, so, take that with a grain of salt.”
“Jonah,” Grace sighed.
“What? I’m bein’ honest. Man deserves to know what he’s gettin’.
” Jonah scratched the back of his head and yawned wide enough to show every tooth he still had and the gap where the missing one lived.
“But yeah, I can work. I mean, I ain’t never done much ranch work, I’ll be honest, but I ain’t above nothin’ and I ain’t too proud for hard labor. ”
“Good. Because there’s plenty of it.” Logan let go of his hand. “I’m offerin’ you a position on the ranch. Steady work, steady pay. You’d sleep in the bunkhouse, eat with the family. My brothers will try to call me a tyrant, but—”
Grace squinted. “Logan…”
Logan sighed. “I’ll, uh, try not to be.”
Jonah broke into that lopsided grin, the one she’d grown up watching, and the gap in his teeth caught the morning light.
“Mr. Foster, you got yourself a ranch hand.”