The Baby Who Came to Honey Lantern After Midnight. By Spring, Widow Creek Would Learn Why Her Mother Had Chosen That Door.
By dawn, half of Widow Creek would have condemned Maribel Quinn for what she did.
By spring, some of those same people would stand outside her bakery weeping.
But on that frozen December night, with a starving infant weakening in her arms and a broken rancher watching from across the room, Maribel cared about only one thing.
Keeping Grace Pierce alive.
The baby’s searching mouth pressed against the front of Maribel’s dress.
Maribel closed her eyes.
Six weeks earlier, she had held Matthew Quinn against her breast while his tiny breaths became farther and farther apart.
She remembered the helplessness.
The doctor removing his spectacles.
Her husband Elias sitting beside the bed, already hollowed out by the fever that would kill him only eleven days later.
She remembered begging God.
Begging the doctor.
Begging anyone.
And afterward, she remembered waking night after night with her body aching to feed a child who lay beneath frozen earth.
Now another baby was dying in her arms.
No.
Maribel looked at Nolan Pierce.
His enormous frame seemed strangely diminished in the warm bakery. Snow melted from his shoulders and darkened the wooden floor beneath his boots. He watched her with the expression of a man who had already endured too many funerals and was waiting for one more.
“Turn around,” Maribel said.
Nolan blinked.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Color rose beneath the frost-reddened skin of his face.
“Mrs. Quinn, I—”
“Mr. Pierce, your daughter is hungry, and I am not going to debate modesty while she dies.”
He turned so quickly he nearly struck his hip against the flour table.
Maribel carried Grace behind the hanging curtain that separated the bakery kitchen from the tiny room where Maribel sometimes slept when she worked late.
Her hands trembled.
Not from shame.
From memory.
She loosened the top of her dress.
Grace rooted weakly once.
Twice.
Then found what she needed.
The first pull was so faint Maribel almost didn’t feel it.
Then another.
Then another.
A tiny sound escaped Grace’s throat.
Not a cry.
A swallow.
Maribel’s breath broke.
The child was drinking.
Her knees nearly gave way.
She sat on the edge of the narrow bed and cradled Grace more securely.
“There you are,” she whispered.
The baby swallowed again.
“That’s it, little one.”
Tears blurred Maribel’s vision.
“Don’t you dare quit now.”
Outside the curtain, Nolan made a sound that might have been a cough.
Maribel knew better.
The great silent rancher of Raven Hollow was crying.
Neither of them spoke for several minutes.
There was only the crackle of the oven, the wind against the windows, and the fragile rhythm of a baby choosing life.
When Grace finally stopped nursing, her face looked different.
Still pale.
Still frighteningly thin.
But no longer gray.
Maribel touched one finger to the infant’s cheek.
Grace’s hand closed weakly around it.
Maribel swallowed.
“Mr. Pierce?”
“Yes?”
“You can turn around.”
Nolan did.
His eyes went immediately to Grace.
“Is she—”
“She ate.”
He seemed unable to move.
Maribel stood and crossed the room.
