“What?”
The old doctor said nothing.
Jack grabbed his collar.
“What?”
Harland whispered:
“Mary knew.”
Jack released him.
The doctor sagged against the wall.
“She regained consciousness after you went outside to fetch water.”
“No.”
“Hester placed Clara’s child beside her.”
Jack shook his head.
“No.”
“Mary asked why the baby had a red ribbon around her ankle.”
Jack remembered that ribbon.
He had found it days later in Mary’s sewing box and never known why.
“Hester told her everything.”
Jack’s voice disappeared.
“And Mary?”
Harland’s tears returned.
“She made us promise to keep the child safe.”
The room blurred.
Jack could see Mary dying.
Her cold fingers around his.
Her lips struggling to form words.
Keep her.
He had thought she meant their daughter.
Perhaps she had.
Just not biologically.
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She tried.”
Harland looked toward the floor.
“She had minutes left.”
Jack sat heavily.
Harland opened a drawer.
“There’s something else.”
He removed an envelope.
Jack recognized the handwriting before the doctor placed it on the desk.
Mary.
On the front was written:
For Clara Vale. If she ever comes.
Jack’s heart stopped.
He returned to the ranch after dark.
Clara was sitting beside Lily’s cradle.
Jack entered without removing his coat.
She looked at his face and understood.
“You know.”
He placed Mary’s letter on the table.
Clara stared at the handwriting.
Her knees weakened.
“Where did you get that?”
“Harland.”
She reached for it.
Jack’s hand covered the envelope.
“Before you read it.”
Clara looked up.
“Did you know Lily was yours when you came here?”
Silence.
“Answer me.”
“I suspected.”
“How?”
“My father’s papers.”
She removed several folded pages from her pocket.
“These are what I stole.”
They were receipts.
Payments to Hester Quinn.
Payments to the stage driver.
A payment to Doc Harland marked only January 21.
Harland had claimed he returned the money.
Clara continued.
“I found a letter from Hester written six weeks ago. She was dying of consumption in Kansas.”
Jack held still.
“She confessed.”
“She said my baby hadn’t died.”
Clara began crying.
“She said Mary Turner’s child was stillborn, and mine was given to Mary.”
Jack looked at the cradle.
“So you came for Lily.”
Clara shook her head immediately.
“No.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I came to see whether it was true.”
“You crossed half Colorado because you were curious?”
“I crossed half Colorado because for two months I had been grieving a child who was alive.”
Her voice rose.
“I didn’t know what I would do when I found her. I imagined taking her. I imagined hating you. I imagined hating Mary.”
She pressed a hand to her chest.
“Then I reached your porch and saw your note.”
Jack said nothing.
“I read that your baby needed milk.”
Clara looked toward Lily.
“And I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That if she was mine, I could save her.”
The anger drained from Jack, leaving something worse.
Fear.
“You’ll take her.”
Clara’s expression crumbled.
“She is my daughter.”
Jack turned away as though struck.
There it was.
The sentence he had dreaded.
Not because it was false.
Because it was true.
Lily was Clara’s child.
Blood of her blood.
He was merely the man who had been handed her in a dark room and told she belonged to him.
Jack walked toward the cradle.
Lily slept with her mouth slightly open.
He had counted those breaths for sixty nights.
He had learned the exact cry that meant hunger and the one that meant discomfort.
