Better than fine. Just feeling grateful. He knelt beside her chair, his hand joining hers on her belly. For what? For you?
For this? She gestured around the cabin, their home built and expanded and filled with evidence of their life together. For getting on that train even though I was terrified. For lying in my letters because I wanted this so badly. I was willing to risk everything for it.
I'm grateful for your lies, too, Silas said softly. Because they brought you here, and you brought me back to life. They sat together as the winter storm raged outside. Two people who'd found each other through desperation and built something real through honesty, waiting for the spring that would bring their child into the world. February came and went, each day a little longer than the last.
Winter's grip slowly loosening. March arrived with mud and meltwater, the world transforming from white to brown as snow retreated and revealed the land beneath. Norah was huge now, her belly so round that simple tasks like bending over or putting on boots, became complex negotiations with gravity and balance. I feel like thunder, she complained one morning, trying and failing to see her own feet. Enormous and ungainly, and likely to break things accidentally.
You look beautiful, Silas said, meaning it completely like life itself. You're biased. Absolutely, he agreed. But also right, the baby was due in April, according to Sarah's calculations, which meant they had weeks left to prepare. Silas had converted the small addition off their bedroom into a nursery, painting the walls a warm yellow, and installing the cradle he'd built beside a window that caught morning sun.
Norah had sewn curtains and made blankets and organized tiny clothes by size in a chest Tom had built as a gift. Everything was ready. They were ready, or at least as ready as two people who'd never done this before could be. On April 3rd, just after dawn, Norah woke to a sensation she'd been told to expect, but still caught her unprepared. A tightening across her belly that built and released like waves on a shore. Not painful yet, but insistent.
A signal that time was running out, that the baby had decided today was the day. "Silas," she said, her voice remarkably calm, considering the fear coursing through her. "It's time." He was up and dressed in minutes, moving with the kind of controlled urgency that came from practicing this moment in his mind a hundred times. He rode to Tom's ranch to fetch Sarah, who'd promised to help with the delivery, then to town for Doc Miller, the old physician who handled everything from cattle diseases to human births with equal competence.
By the time he returned to the ranch, the cabin was full of women, Sarah, her daughters, Mrs. Chen and three others from the Valley Association who'd come to help however they could. They'd taken over the bedroom, relegating Silas to the main room, where he paced like thunder in a two small pen, wearing a path in the floor, and driving himself half mad with worry and helplessness. Tom arrived and sat with him, saying nothing because there was nothing useful to say. Frank came too, and Pete Morrison and old Marcus Webb. The men gathered without being asked, a silent show of support, waiting for news and offering the kind of company that didn't require words.
Inside the bedroom, Norah labored through the morning and into the afternoon. Sarah held one hand, Mrs. Chen the other, both of them offering encouragement and practical advice, while Doc Miller monitored her progress with the detached competence of someone who' delivered hundreds of babies. "You're doing fine," he kept saying. Strong as an ox, which is exactly what you want in childbirth. Just keep breathing through the contractions.