Chapter Four #2
I left Flora with Connie and crossed to the farm supply.
Lyle Bowen was behind his counter sorting invoices, tall, sun-leathered, a man whose face had more weather in it than most almanacs.
He’d been running this store since before I’d moved up the mountain and he had the small-town gift of knowing everyone’s business without appearing to try.
“Morrow.” He looked past me through the storefront window, at my truck, at the general store where Flora was visible through the glass, her hands moving while she talked. “Word is you’ve got a woman on the mountain.”
“I need five bags of the clover seed and three flats of bee balm.”
“Mm-hm.” He pulled the flats from the rear shelf. Stacked them. Took his time. “Pretty woman, from what I hear. Connie says she’s doing garden work for you.”
“She’s designing a garden. That’s the job.”
“Uh-huh.” Lyle leaned on the counter. He had the look of a man enjoying himself at someone else’s expense. “That your girl, Morrow?”
“She’s my garden designer.”
From behind the seed rack: “I am his garden designer, thank you very much.”
Flora. Rounding the end of the aisle with a paper sack from Connie’s tucked under her arm, chin lifted, eyes sharp with something halfway between indignation and a laugh she was barely containing. Our gazes caught. Her mouth twitched. Mine wanted to.
Lyle looked between us with the patience of a man who’d heard this exact denial from every couple in the valley and had never once bought it.
“Five bags clover, three flats bee balm,” he said. “I’ll load your truck.”
The drive back was quiet for about ninety seconds.
“Does the entire town think we’re sleeping together?” she asked.
“It’s a small town. People see a stranger’s car on my road. They talk.”
“And what are they saying?”
“Lyle’s been married thirty years. He looked at us and didn’t bother asking twice.”
She turned toward the window. I could see her profile, the tilt of her nose, her lower lip caught between her teeth. “Atlas.”
“I’m right here.”
A breath. Her mouth opened. Her expression shifted, heavy and real, the same weight I’d been watching her carry since the day she tripped into my yard.
She shook her head. “Never mind. Tell me about that particular variety you ordered. Why the drainage area?”
I told her. She listened. And the thing she’d almost said filled the cab, taking up more space than either of us.
DAYS FOLDED INTO EACH other. The rhythm settled: mornings on the property, her with her drawings and plant maps and that running narration to the seedlings, me with the colonies and the extraction schedule and her voice always somewhere on the air.
I could find her without looking. Her laugh, the rustle of paper, the scrape of her boot on gravel.
She’d woven herself into the daily shape of my life and I hadn’t noticed until she was part of the pattern.
She cooked with me most nights. Not a formal arrangement.
It wasn't discussed. The work day ended and the kitchen was there and she was there and food needed making. Elk stew one evening, thick with parsnips and shallots from my root cellar. A roasted chicken the next night with rosemary and a glaze she’d mixed from three of my wildflower jars while arguing that the buckwheat was superior.
“Your taste buds are broken,” I told her.
She laughed and flicked glaze at my shirt.
I caught her wrist without thinking, her pulse hammering against my thumb, and we stood there until the oven timer broke it.
After dinner that night we sat on the porch.
She was telling me about her sister Dahlia, a nurse in Seattle, and her family’s Sunday dinners over video call — her mother holding the phone at an angle that captured the ceiling, her father shouting from the kitchen that nobody appreciated his enchiladas.
She was laughing while she told it, leaning back on her hands, and I watched her and thought about Sunday evenings on this porch alone.
The quiet after the bees settled. The second chair I’d built because a porch should have two, even if only one got used.
“My parents call on Sundays too,” I said.
I was looking at the meadow. “My mom asks if I’m eating enough.
My brother sends pictures of his kids in Missoula.
” I stopped. The next part cost me. “It’s a good life.
I built exactly what I set out to build.
But there’s a second chair on this porch and nobody’s sat in it until you. ”
She didn’t say anything. She just shifted closer until her shoulder pressed against mine, solid and warm, and she stayed there.
She showed up the next day in a white sundress with small blue flowers. And work boots. The combination should have looked absurd, lace hem, steel toes, and instead it looked like everything I’d wanted standing at the foot of my stairs looking embarrassed.
“Not a word,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You’re smirking.”
“I don’t smirk.”
“Your face is doing something that in any court of law would be classified as a smirk. I packed for a long weekend. This was the only clean thing left and the alternative was a bath towel, and I seriously considered it.”
I looked at her. The dress was thin. Morning light came through it and the outline of her body hit me all at once, hips and waist and the whole warm shape of her, and my brain went offline.
She was standing in my meadow in a sundress and boots with her curls loose and the light turning her skin warm gold.
And then I could see her in this same meadow months from now, the dress pulled taut across a rounded belly, her hand resting where the fabric stretched.
The image arrived fully formed, so vivid and so welcome that I forgot to breathe.
She said something about the drainage stakes and I answered her.
I have no idea what I said. It might have been English.
She gave me a strange look and went back to her question, and I was standing in the spring sun having a vision of a future I hadn’t earned yet and somehow forming words about irrigation.
“There’s a washing machine in the utility closet,” I said. “You can throw your things in while you work.”
“That feels more domestic than either of us is ready to admit.”
“You’re wearing a dress to dig in dirt.”
She gathered the skirt in both fists and marched past me toward the garden beds. The dress swished against her thighs. The boots left prints in the soft earth. I watched her go and couldn’t remember the last time I’d smiled without deciding to.
She’d started leaving things at my cabin: a pencil case on the kitchen shelf, a half-finished trace on the table, a water bottle by the railing. Small trespasses. I didn’t move any of them.
But the questions hadn’t stopped.
She’d gotten better at folding them in, casual, tucked between observations about bloom timing or colony behavior, but the pattern held if you paid attention.
She knew things she shouldn’t. My degree, my family, my brother’s name.
She asked about Montana State and nodded before I’d finished answering.
She mentioned Missoula once and caught herself so fast the correction sounded rehearsed.
And the other things.
That protective gesture, palm low, fingers spread, a dozen times over the past week, always when she thought she was unobserved. In the garden, on the steps, walking to her car. Constant. Unconscious.
The fatigue. She ran full throttle until the early afternoon and then she’d flag all at once. She’d sit on the cabin steps and close her eyes and breathe with the careful rhythm of someone managing nausea through sheer will.
One morning I was rendering wax in the extraction shed and she walked in and walked straight back out, her face gone gray-green. “Just a head rush,” she said when I came after her. She was perched on an overturned crate taking small sips of water, knuckles white around the bottle.
When I’d offered her coffee because she’d run out of tea, she’d taken it with a tight smile and barely touched it. The third time, she lifted the mug, went very still, and set it down. Clutched her peppermint thermos instead and pretended nothing had happened.
She was pregnant.
I sat down on the porch step. Missed it the first time, caught the edge, sat down hard enough to rattle my teeth. The colonies were working the meadow. The creek was running. Everything the same as five minutes ago except the ground had shifted under my whole life.
She was pregnant and she’d come to find me. My degree, my family, Nate’s name — she’d read them in a file. A donor catalogue. Because I’d been a donor, eight years ago, a clinic in Bozeman, textbook money that paid for one semester and then I’d never thought about it again.
She’d thought about it. She’d picked me from a list, driven nine hours, tripped over my hive boxes, and invented a job to stay.
I pressed my palms flat on my knees. My hands were shaking.
The woman who argued with sketches of yarrow and flushed pink when I said her name. She was carrying my child. And every deflection, every too-bright laugh, every time she’d almost said the real thing and swallowed it back — she was terrified of losing what we’d built.
I knew the feeling.
If I asked her directly, she’d bolt. I’d seen it: her whole body tensing at a question that cut too close, the sudden pivot to soil composition, the brightness dialed up to cover the flinch.
I asked, she ran, she packed the rental, and I’d spend the rest of my life knowing I’d had her and lost her because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
So I wouldn’t ask. I’d wait, the way I waited for a new colony to settle: patient, steady, giving it room to choose. And I’d build while I waited.
I SWAPPED OUT THE REGULAR for decaf. She didn’t always drink my coffee.
She had her own tea most days. But when she ran out, when she forgot her thermos, when the cold came in hard enough that she’d accept whatever I offered, I wanted it to be safe for her.
I set the decaf on the counter and didn’t mention it.
She took a cup when the temperature dropped. Drank it slowly, both hands wrapped around the mug. Didn’t wince. Didn’t set it aside. “This is better than usual,” she said, surprised.
“I tried a different roast. The dark stuff was getting old.”
She looked at me over the rim. Held the look a beat longer than coffee deserved. “Well. I approve.”
I drove to town alone the next day. Told her I had a delivery to make. Parked on the side street so her rental, still at my place, wouldn’t be visible from the front and walked in through the back of the general store.
Connie’s vitamin aisle was four shelves of aspirin, cold medicine, and Band-Aids. The prenatal supplements were on the bottom shelf, one brand, the bottle dusty. I picked it up. Held it. My pulse loud in my ears.
“That for you?” Connie asked from behind me. She’d appeared silently. Standard Connie.
“Just picking up a few things.”
“Mm-hm.” She looked at the bottle. Looked at me. Her face went soft in a way I’d never seen from her, stripped of the dry commentary, almost gentle. She rang it up with a box of ginger tea and a jar of ginger preserves and put them in a bag without a word.
I set the vitamins in my bathroom cabinet behind the aspirin. Where they’d sit until she found them, or until I found a way to tell her I knew without losing her.
I climbed the loft ladder after she left.
The space had been storage since I’d built the cabin: spare frames, old equipment, a broken smoker, boxes I’d meant to sort through and never had.
I started carrying it down. Load by load, clearing the room.
The floor underneath was rough-cut pine.
I swept it. Ran my hand across the boards, checking for splinters that would need sanding.
Good shape. South wall was solid, but the right place for a window. Big enough.
I didn’t let myself say what it was for. Not yet.
SHE LEFT THE WAY SHE always did. A kiss at my door that started quick and turned slow, her palm flat on my chest, my hand on her hip.
She pulled back just enough to meet my eyes, warm, brown, full of everything she was still too scared to say, and then she turned and walked to the car with her keys in her hand.
“See you in the morning?” she asked. The question she still asked every night. As if the answer were in doubt.
“I’ll be on the porch. And the coffee will be the good kind.”
She laughed. Soft, surprised, the kind of laugh that wasn’t for show. She got in the rental and pulled down the drive.
I stood in the doorway and watched her go. Taillights through the pines, red, dimming. Her engine thinning to nothing. The mountain filled back in: creek water, wind, the day’s last birdsong settling in the conifers.
My land. My quiet. Unchanged for six years.
Except the loft was empty and clean. The vitamins were behind the aspirin. The decaf was in the pot. And tomorrow the ginger tea would be on the shelf beside her peppermint, and she’d look at me and I’d look back and neither of us would say the thing that was filling up every room of this cabin.
She’d chosen me. Out of a catalogue, out of everyone. And then she’d come to find me. And every morning she walked up my steps, the truth got a little closer to the surface.
I went inside. Washed the dishes. Turned off the light.
The loft floor was swept and waiting.
So was I.