Chapter Nineteen
The crib had taken him nineteen days to make, which, for context, ranked as roughly seventeen days longer than any reasonable crib should take a man who’d built fence rails and feed troughs.
A crib had four sides, a bottom, and some slats.
Basic joinery. Straight cuts. Logan could’ve knocked it out in an afternoon if he’d approached it the way he approached every other piece of woodwork on this ranch.
But he hadn’t. He’d done it the way a man did things that mattered more than he could explain to himself. Not without his brain scrambling anyway. So, he’d had to start over. Three times.
The first attempt had gone crooked at the headboard because the grain ran wrong.
The second had come out structurally perfect, but the wood had a knot near the top rail that looked like a face.
As ridiculous as it sounded, once he’d seen it, he couldn’t unsee it, and Miriam didn’t need to spend her nights staring at a knot that bore an unsettling resemblance to Mr. Henley from the general store.
The third try, he’d sanded until the oak had smoothed out under his fingers like glass.
Rounded every edge so nothing could catch or scratch.
Carved a row of small flowers along the headboard.
Nothing fancy, just a repeating pattern of five-petal blooms that he’d copied from the roses growing along the porch.
He’d oiled the whole thing twice. Let it cure in the barn under a canvas tarp for three days while the finish hardened.
Then spent an entire Saturday afternoon building the frame for the nursery itself, which he was going to put in Ma’s old sewing room.
Shelves along the back wall, pegs for hanging clothes, a small window seat under the east-facing window where a person could sit and rock a baby in the morning light.
Nineteen days.
Now, he stood outside the nursery door at eight-thirty in the evening with his palms sweating like a sixteen-year-old at a barn dance.
Get ahold of yourself, Foster.
Down the hall, Grace’s voice drifted from the bedroom she shared with Miriam. She sang something low and tuneless, the way she always did at bedtime, a melody that didn’t come from any hymn book Logan recognized.
Logan wiped his palms on his trousers and made his way to her door.
It’s a room. You built a room. People build rooms all the time. This ain’t—it don’t have to be—just show her the room and let her decide what it means.
Soon enough, the door creaked open, and Grace walked out of the room.
She’d changed into the cotton dress she wore around the house in the evenings, the gray one with the small white flowers along the hem that she’d mended twice at the shoulder seam.
Her hair hung loose past her shoulders, freed from the braid she wore during the day, and the lamplight from the bedroom behind her turned the edges of it copper.
She blinked when she saw him. “Hey…”
“Hi. She, uh, is she asleep?”
“Yeah.” She smiled. “Took three rounds of the lullaby tonight. I think she’s getting’ wise to my tricks.”
“Good. I mean—good that she’s sleepin’. Not the tricks part.” Logan rubbed the back of his neck. “I got somethin’ to show you.”
“Now?”
“Yeah. Now’s—it’s gotta be now. While she’s asleep. It’ll make more sense if she’s asleep.”
Grace tilted her head and gave him the look. The one where she tried to figure out what he meant before he’d finished meaning it, her eyes narrowing just a fraction, the freckles across her nose bunching together.
“Is this another ‘theory about fence posts’?”
“Grace—”
“Last time, you talked for forty-five minutes.”
“The fence post thing had merit.”
“Logan, you drew diagrams.”
“Because the angle of the brace matters and nobody in this family—” He breathed in. “Just. Just come with me.”
He turned and walked down the hall before his mouth could steer them into another fence post conversation, which, honestly, had had merit, and the diagrams had clarified points his brothers refused to absorb.
The nursery door sat at the end of the hall. He stopped at the door. Hand on the knob.
“Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Just—close ’em. Please.”
“Logan Foster, if there is a spider in there—”
“There ain’t no spider.”
“—because last time Thomas said ‘close your eyes’ it involved a garter snake, and Mason screamed so loud the horses spooked—”
“Grace.”
She closed her eyes.
He opened the door. Stepped inside. Took the lamp from the hallway hook and carried it in, setting it on the window seat so the light filled the room in a warm wash that caught the fresh whitewash and the oiled oak and the blue calico curtain he’d hung over the east window.
“Alright. Open.”
She opened her eyes.
And Logan… Logan just watched.
Because the thing about building something for nineteen days, sanding it, oiling it, starting over and over again, riding to Gunnison for fabric, and carving flowers into the headboard one petal at a time with a knife so small his fingers cramped after ten minutes—the thing about all that labor landed in the moment someone else saw it.
Right now. The exact second their eyes took in what your hands had done, and either the work meant what you’d intended, or it didn’t.
Grace’s lips parted.
Her gaze moved across the room. She found the crib immediately. The flowers along the headboard. The rounded rails. The mattress he’d stuffed with clean cotton batting and covered in muslin soft enough for a baby’s skin.
Then the shelves, which held folded blankets and the few baby clothes Grace had sewn from flour sacks, and the soft leather shoes Thomas had bought in town last week.
The window seat with the blue calico cushion. The pegs along the wall. The floorboards, which he’d sanded and sealed with beeswax until they caught the light.
She pressed her hand to her mouth. “Logan.”
“It ain’t—I mean, the trim along the baseboard still needs another coat, and I couldn’t find a rug in Gunnison that matched right, so the floor’s bare for now, but I figured I could—”
“Logan.”
She stepped into the room. Crossed to the crib and ran her hand along the top rail. Stopped at the headboard. Touched one of the blooms with her fingertip.
“These are the roses.”
“Yeah.”
“From the porch.”
“Yeah.”
“You carved the porch roses into a crib.”
“I just—they’re—the pattern wasn’t hard, it’s a simple five-petal—”
She turned to face him. “When did you do this?”
“I started it a while back…” He rubbed the back of his head. “One day, I just—I got up, and I walked into the barn, and I needed to do something, and the only thing that made any kind of sense in my head... the baby needed a crib. A real one. A proper crib, in a proper room, because…”
“Yeah?”
“Because I’d spent the whole night thinkin’ about how I told you this wasn’t your home. And, yes, this is for Miriam, but I… uh…”
“Logan?”
“I wanted to build somethin’ that said the opposite.”
Grace pressed her fingers harder against the carved roses. “So, you’ve been workin’ on it—”
“Nineteen days.” He cleared his throat. “I know that’s a long time for a crib. Mason said I could’ve built a whole barn in nineteen days, and he ain’t wrong, but I kept… the headboard wasn’t right the first time. Or the second. The grain went wrong, and then there was a knot that looked like… uh…”
“A knot that looked like what?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Logan.”
“Honestly, I just… It’s disturbin’, you don’t wanna—”
“Logan Foster.”
“It looked like Mr. Henley.”
She covered her mouth again and snorted. “Mr. Henley?”
“From the general store. And I couldn’t… I couldn’t let her sleep under Mr. Henley’s face every night. The man’s got a lazy eye and a mustache that goes in two different directions. Miriam deserves better than that.”
“That she does.” Grace’s voice cracked on the third word. “She deserves so much better than that.”
“So I started over. And then I couldn’t stop fixin’ things. The trim, the shelves, the window seat… I went to Gunnison for the fabric because the store here didn’t have anything that… look, the point is—”
He inhaled.
Because all the things he’d rehearsed in the barn, the neat, organized sentences he’d lined up like fence posts in a row, had scattered. Gone. Every one of them. What remained was the raw material underneath, the stuff before language got to it and tidied it up.
He exhaled.
“You changed everything.”
Grace went still.
“I don’t mean the house. I mean—yeah, the house too, the cookin’ and the cleanin’ and the flowers and all of it, but that ain’t—” He dragged a hand down his face.
“Before you came, I had a plan. I had the ranch. The fence lines. The feed schedule. Every day laid out the same as the one before and the one after, and I told myself that’s what I wanted. ”
“And then?”
“And then you showed up on my doorstep mad enough to spit nails, and this baby showed up cryin’ loud enough to wake the dead, and every single plan I had fell apart in about three days.”
Grace’s chin trembled.
“And I fought it. Lord, I fought it hard. Asked myself every mornin’ for the first two weeks what I’d gotten myself into and how to get back to the way things ran before.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Because you named the baby after my ma. You got on your hands and knees in the dirt and brought those roses back. You made my pa smile for the first time in two years.”
She looked down and blushed.
“You taught me how to hold a baby without actin’ like she’d shatter, and you looked at this ranch and this family and all our mess and you just...” He gulped. “You stayed. Even when I gave you every reason not to. When I told you to…”
“You came and got me.” Grace’s eyes spilled over. Two tracks, one down each cheek. “You rode out before dawn and built me a fire I didn’t ask for.”
“I’d do it again.”
“I know.”
“Every mornin’. I’d ride out every mornin’ if that’s what it took.”
“Logan—”
“And Miriam… I spent the first week tryin’ to give her away. And now I can’t—I hear her laugh from across the yard and I stop whatever I’m doin’. Just stop. Because that sound—”
His throat closed.
“That sound is the best thing in my life, Grace. Her and you.”
“Logan—”
“No, I need to say it. Please.”
She nodded.
“The two of you showed up and tore my whole world apart and put it back together in a shape I didn’t know I needed, and I just—I wanted to build you somethin’. I know it’s just a nursery, but it is for both of you. I swear it. I just—”
“Logan—”
“—wanted to make somethin’ to say this is yours. This house and this family. Yours.”
He ran out of words.
Grace crossed the room.
She moved fast. Faster than he’d expected. Fast enough that he didn’t have time to brace or think or do any of the things his brain normally insisted on before allowing a moment to just happen. She grabbed a fistful of his shirt collar and pulled him down.
Then she kissed him.
And every plan, fence, locked door, straight line, and ironed saddle blanket in Logan Foster’s carefully ordered life collapsed into the space between her lips and his.
She tasted like the chamomile tea she drank after supper. Her hand on his collar pulled tight, twisting her fingers in the fabric, holding him there like she’d thought about this and decided he didn’t get to back away from it.
He kissed her back.
He’d meant it to be careful, meant to give her something measured and respectful, the kind of kiss a man offers when he isn’t sure he’s earned more. But her hand came up to the side of his face, and whatever restraint he’d built over nineteen days of sawdust and silence just buckled.
Her hand softened on his collar. Slid from the fabric to the side of his neck until her palm pressed flat against his pulse point, and her mouth curved against his in a smile she didn’t break the kiss to show.
Then she pulled back. Just far enough to breathe. Her forehead rested against his, and her eyes were closed. The lamplight from the window seat turned her eyelashes into small shadows on her cheeks.
“Thank you.”
He sniffed. “What for?”
“For the room. The crib. The roses on the headboard, the fabric from Gunnison, the window seat, and all nineteen ridiculous days of it.”
“It wasn’t—”
“It was.” She curled her fingers into his shirt. “It was, Logan.”
He chuckled and kissed her.