Mason leaned over the table.

“I paid a thief to stop him from hurting you. There’s a difference.”

Tears gathered again.

“You don’t belong to me. You never did.”

“But I have nowhere else.”

“Then stay until you do.”

Her face crumpled.

Mason pointed at the ledger fragment.

“And if someone comes here looking for that?”

A long silence followed.

Clara finally whispered, “They will.”

For four days, nothing happened.

That almost made it worse.

Mason rode the boundaries of his property every morning with his rifle across his saddle.

He checked tracks.

Watched distant hills.

Slept lightly.

Clara began working less after he caught her trying to lift a feed sack and nearly shouted the roof off the barn.

“I’m pregnant, Mason. I’m not made of glass.”

“You fell over last week.”

“I got dizzy.”

“You nearly knocked your skull against a hitching post.”

She folded her arms.

“I carried water farther than this every day when I was twelve.”

“Congratulations. You’re not twelve anymore.”

She stared at him.

Then, unexpectedly, laughed.

Mason scowled.

“What?”

“You sound like an angry grandmother.”

He tried not to smile.

Failed.

It was the first time either of them had laughed since the ledger appeared.

After that, the ranch began changing in small ways.

Clara planted wildflowers beside the porch.

Mason repaired the room at the end of the hall that had remained locked since Anna died.

He told himself it would become a nursery because Clara needed one.

But when he carried Anna’s old sewing basket into the attic, his hands shook so badly he had to stop halfway up the ladder.

Grief did not disappear with time.

It changed shape.

For seven years, his grief had been a locked room.

Now Clara’s presence had opened the door.

One evening they sat on the porch beneath a violet sky.

Clara had begun showing more clearly.

Mason noticed her rubbing one side of her belly.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Then why are you making that face?”

“The baby kicked.”

Mason froze.

Clara smiled.

“Want to feel?”

His first instinct was to say no.

Something about it seemed too intimate.

Then Clara took his hand and placed it gently against the side of her stomach.

They waited.

Nothing.

Mason raised an eyebrow.

“Your child has manners.”

“Give him time.”

“Him?”

“I think it’s a boy.”

“You know that?”

“No.”

“Solid medical reasoning.”

Clara elbowed him.

Then it happened.

A small movement beneath his palm.

Mason’s expression changed.

He had once imagined children with Anna.

Three, she had insisted.

Two boys and a girl.

Mason had argued for four simply because arguing made her eyes flash.

They had tried.

Year after year.

Nothing.

After Anna died, Mason had convinced himself that perhaps it was mercy.

No child had been left behind to mourn her.

Now beneath his hand, life moved.