27. Nora #2
They knew. Of course they knew. The whole town knew he’d built it, and the whole town had decided to make him pay handsomely for the privilege of carrying his own gift home, every dollar of it feeding the clinic fund. It was the most Primrose thing I’d ever witnessed.
“Two hundred!” Vivian Anderson’s voice rang out from the back of the crowd.
I turned to find Hunt’s mother standing near the funnel cake booth, her hand raised high, her expression fierce with delight. She’d driven down from the family estate that morning, claiming she wanted to see the festival, and she was clearly enjoying herself more than anyone here.
Hunt raised his hand. “Two-fifty.”
“He’s bidding on his own crib,” Mrs. Patterson stage-whispered, gleeful.
“Three hundred,” Vivian shot back, winking at me.
“Three-fifty,” Hunt said.
“You built that,” I said quietly.
“I did.”
“You built it, and you donated it, and now you’re buying it back.”
“The money goes to the clinic fund.” He raised his hand again without looking away from me. “Whatever it takes. The crib goes to our daughter. Everybody wins.”
The bidding climbed after that mostly for sport, the whole town driving the number higher just to watch him keep saying yes, until June finally brought the gavel down at a figure so scandalous the grange ladies gasped.
“Sold,” June announced, “to the anonymous donor, for an amount that’s going to buy this clinic a very nice ultrasound machine.”
The crowd erupted.
Vivian made her way through to where I was standing, her heels somehow not sinking into the grass, her silver hair gleaming in the fairy lights. She took my hands in hers and squeezed.
“He made that with his own two hands,” she said.
“Sat in that barn for weeks and wouldn’t let anyone see.
My son. Who used to sign checks so he wouldn’t have to show up in person.
” Her eyes were bright. “You did that. You’re the daughter I always wanted and never had, and I’m so glad you’re letting my son earn you back. ”
I was crying again. “Vivian.”
“Don’t argue with me. I’m old and stubborn and I always get my way.” She pulled me into a hug that smelled like expensive perfume and the faint echo of horses. “Welcome back to the family, Nora. Even if you never officially left.”
The festival wound down around nine.
The lights were still strung between the lamp posts, but the crowds had thinned. The petting zoo had been packed up. The food vendors were cleaning their booths. Somewhere in the distance, a lone fiddle player was practicing, the notes drifting through the cool October air.
Hunt had finally escaped the cow costume.
He found me at the clinic booth, helping the volunteers pack up the pamphlets. His hair was damp with sweat, his shirt untucked, his expression the particular combination of exhausted and satisfied that came from spending four hours entertaining children.
“The udder chafes,” he said. “You should know that. For the record.”
“I’ll add it to my list of things I’m grateful I never experienced.”
“The list is growing.”
“It’s a long list.” I handed the last stack of pamphlets to a volunteer and turned to face him. “Thank you. For doing that. The kids loved it, the money’s going to help so many families, and I got to watch you get cuddled by Waffles in front of everyone who’s been betting against you.”
“The cuddling was unexpected.”
“The cuddling was the best part.”
He pulled me close, his arms wrapping around me, his chin resting on top of my head. The familiar warmth of him sank into my bones.
“I’d wear a hundred cow costumes,” he murmured into my hair. “I’d wear a thousand. I’d do anything you asked, as long as you keep looking at me the way you looked at me tonight.”
“How was I looking at you?”
“Like you were proud of me.”
“I am proud of you.”
“I know.” His arms tightened. “That’s the part I’m still getting used to.”
It was full dark by the time we drove home, the festival lights shrinking in the side mirror, Waffles’s honorable-mention ribbon from the goat show still somehow rattling around in the truck bed.
I was warm and drowsy and stupidly happy, one hand on the baby and the other tucked into Hunt’s on the console, and I let myself have it. The whole soft ordinary night of it.
Then his headlights swept up the drive and caught a car that didn’t belong.
The same rental from the clinic sidewalk, or its twin, parked at an angle across my gravel like the person behind the wheel had never once in her life worried about being in somebody’s way.
Hunt’s hand went still around mine.
She was already out of it. Already on my porch, the porch I’d sanded and painted with my own hands, leaning against my front door like she had every right to the space. Heels on my porch boards at ten o’clock at night. That smile.
“There you are,” Sasha said. “I was starting to think you’d stood me up. Wouldn’t that be ironic.”
I got out of the truck. I don’t fully remember deciding to.
Hunt was out his side a half second later, already moving to put himself between us, and I stepped around him, because this was my house, my porch, my gravel, and I was done being handled and done being protected and done letting this woman make me small.
“You need to leave,” I said.
“I drove a long way.” She pushed off the door and came to the top of the steps, and up close the smile didn’t reach anything at all.
“The least you can do is hear me out. I know about the baby, Nora. Congratulations, by the way. I know about the little clinic and the little town and the whole little life you’ve built out here in the middle of nowhere with my leftovers.
” Her eyes flicked to Hunt and back. “I know everything. And I want you to understand one thing before you go to sleep tonight in your cozy farmhouse. I’m not done. Not with him, and not with you.”
The old me would’ve gone cold and quiet. Would’ve absorbed it, carried it, lain awake with it for a week.
I laughed instead.
It surprised her. It surprised me a little too. But she’d driven eight hours to stand on a porch I’d rebuilt with my own two hands and threaten a woman who had already survived losing everything this exact person tried to take, and the smallness of it was suddenly, blazingly clear to me.
“You came all this way,” I said, “to a town that already knows exactly what you are, to threaten me on my own front steps, in the dark, where nobody can see you do it. That’s not power, Sasha.
That’s what’s left over when the room finally turns on you.
” I climbed the steps until we were level, until she had to look at me.
“Get off my porch. And whatever you think you’re going to do next, do it in the daylight, where people can watch. I dare you.”
For one second the mask slipped and I watched her recalculating. Then it sealed over.
“We’ll see,” she said.
She got in her rental and reversed too fast across my gravel and drove off toward the lights of town, taillights shrinking down the county road until they were gone.
Hunt came up the steps behind me and set his hands on my shoulders, and my hands were shaking, and it wasn’t fear.
“You okay?”
“No,” I said honestly. Then: “But I’m not scared. That part’s new.”
He turned me around. In the porch light his face had gone to that old flat cold I remembered, the one that used to mean somebody was about to regret crossing him. But when he spoke, it wasn’t the old Hunt’s voice. It was quieter than that, and steadier, and it moved me more than fury would’ve.
“We don’t carry this one in the dark,” he said. “In the morning, we tell the whole town. Every light on. She wants to come at us where nobody can see? Then we make sure everybody’s watching.”
“Together,” I said.
“Every light on.” He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, his thumb lingering at my jaw. “Now come inside. She doesn’t get one more minute of tonight.”
I let him walk me in, his hand warm at the small of my back, and behind us the porch stood empty and the county road stayed dark, and for the first time in a long time the thing coming for us was going to have to come in the light.