Silas cleared his throat.
“If you want it.”
Samuel looked at Nora.
She nodded.
Then he threw both arms around Silas’s leg.
The entire kitchen went silent.
Silas stood like a fence post struck by lightning.
Then, very carefully, he placed one hand on the boy’s head.
That night, after the children slept, Nora found Silas on the front steps staring out at the prairie.
“You’re good with them,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
He shook his head.
“I’m useful with them. That’s different.”
“Sometimes usefulness is how love sneaks in when pride locks the front door.”
He turned toward her.
The wind moved loose strands of hair across her face, and for a moment he looked at her as if she were something both dangerous and necessary.
“You talk like a preacher.”
“I cook better than one.”
That earned a real laugh.
Small.
Rusty.
But real.
The affection between them grew slowly, not like a lightning strike but like fire taking hold in damp wood. Hard to start. Impossible to ignore once warm.
Nora found herself wearing her blue calico dress more often when he was expected.
Silas began washing before visits even if he claimed dust was honest.
Jane noticed everything.
“He likes you,” she said one afternoon while helping knead dough.
“He likes the children.”
“He looks at the children kindly. He looks at you like he’s afraid you’ll disappear.”
Nora pressed her palms into the dough.
“That is a serious accusation from a girl with flour on her nose.”
Jane wiped her nose and missed the flour completely.
“I’m just saying.”
Nora was frightened by how much she hoped Jane was right.
Hope, after loss, felt almost improper.
As if loving Daniel truly meant never letting her heart lift again.
But at night, when she sat by the kitchen fire feeling her baby turn inside her, she wondered whether grief and love might share the same room without dishonoring each other.
Then the legal notice came.
It arrived with a county clerk in a stiff collar, who looked eager to finish his errand and leave before the chapel roof gave him tetanus. Reverend Bell was out visiting a sick farmer’s wife, so Nora signed for the envelope herself.
The seal belonged to an attorney in the county seat.
She opened it at the kitchen table.
The words blurred at first.
Property deed.
Reversion.
Owner of record.
Silas Greer.
Nora read it twice.
Then a third time.
The chapel.
The kitchen.
The barn.
The yard where the children played.
The garden she had coaxed from stubborn soil.