He texted back, I’ll take that as a compliment, which made her love him all the more.
It did feel like ages before she saw a crack in one of the eggs. Then it took another round of ages before a little beak finally found its way through. She kept Adam abreast of the entire process with a seemingly endless stream of text messages.
I think I see a foot!
Is it normal to take this long?
So close!
He rarely replied with anything other than an emoji or advice like,Resist the urge to help them. I will come to check them in a bit.
She texted back,That’s right. Mustn’t spoil the kidlets.
Then she whispered to a chick. “You can do it, little one. If you hatch first, you’ll be my favorite. There are big perks to being my favorite.”
Finally, the first chick kicked off the last piece of its shell and started the long process of learning to use its legs. She was so thrilled that she gave it a soft applause. “Congratulations!” she said in a loud whisper. “I’m calling you Blue since you were the first, and you get the blue ribbon.”
Later, when the chick’s feathers had dried into bright yellow fluff, she was able to put a little leg band on it. She chose the blue one and gave the chick another little pep talk before putting it back in the incubator with the rest of the eggs. “Encourage your siblings now,” she said.
No matter how many times she’d seen them on screens, Kyra couldn’t have begun to predict how hard she would fall for baby chicks when she was finally able to hold them in her hands. Their little peeps gave her so much joy. Even though they’d done the hatching all on their own, she couldn’t help but feel a little pride over having been the person to witness it. She was there to protect them, and she felt a maternal instinct for the little yellow balls of fluff.
When Adam got back to the main house that night, he helped her to move the chicks to the indoor brooder he had built for them. It looked quite cozy, with soft bedding and a nice warm heat lamp. Kyra had taken to calling it the Sage Hotel, after Adam’s surname, and it stuck. She looked up pictures by other breeders and was pleased to find that Adam’s brooder seemed extra luxurious.
“All our babies deserve the best,” she said to herself when Adam wasn’t listening. “I’ll accept nothing less.” Reflexively, she patted the bump of her belly as she said, “That includes you, little one.”
The chicks turned out to be a bit of a handful, but they were an adorable handful regardless. Little Red — the second chick to hatch — was the first to escape the brooder. Adam had to build higher walls for them after a while because they had so much energy and very little fear. When they were a bit bigger, he would let them run around in supervised play sessions.
Kyra couldn’t get over the man’s ability to be gentle. At first glance, he didn’t come off as a gentle person at all. He was tall, brawny, a man of few words and a whole lot of action. But when he handled those little chicks, he did so as if he thought they might break at any moment. She’d never seen anyone be so gentle with anything in her life.
It wasn’t only the way he handled them, either. The coop he’d made for them was the nicest one Kyra had ever seen, and he’d even let her help. The interior had individual laying boxes and lots of flat perches for them to rest on. It opened into a large outdoor area, too, so they could choose to go out and see the sky even when raptors were around.
The whole setup reminded Kyra of those super fancy “catios” people made for their spoiled cats. Now they were going to have spoiled chickens. She chuckled at the thought. “Little Blue and Little Red are going to love this,” she said to herself while she admired it one morning. It felt so good to have made something like this with her own hands, even though she did have help. She took some pride in it and decided she was going to learn to build more things in the future.
Getting to know chickens turned out to be more fun than Kyra could have anticipated. They really did have their own personalities, she noticed. She was glad these chickens were going to be egg-laying chickens, so she could get attached without worry.
Kyra was not the sort of person to not get attached, no matter how hard she may try, in any given situation. She couldn’t help falling in love. She’d always been this way, ever since she was a little girl. Her mom used to tease her about it when she had trouble saying goodbye to certain toys, or when she cried at her graduation because she didn’t want to say goodbye to the high school.
“This is Alder Creek, honey,” her mom had assured her. “You’ll still see your friends. Even if they move away, you can keep in touch.”
But it wasn’t only losing her friends that upset Kyra. It was losing school, her teachers, her routine, her extracurricular activities, even daily lunch in the cafeteria. She had loved all of it, and she was reluctant to say goodbye to anything. Though she craved new things, she also wanted to hold on to the old ones. It wasn’t change that scared Kyra at all; it was letting go. So, if she could help it, she always held on to the things she loved.
If she had been a little more self-aware, she might have realized this was happening with the ranch, too. It wasn’t only Adam she didn’t want to lose. Just the thought of letting go of the ranch itself hit her so hard, she chose to think of it as seldom as she could. Every cow, every chicken, each and every horse, she loved. The detached apartment, the green barn she’d painted, and now the chicken coop. How she wished she could hold on to it forever.
Deep down, she knew that might be impossible, but she shut that thought down the second it occurred to her and continued to hope for the best.
CHAPTER 13
ADAM
Adam was putting the final touches on the chicken coop when he heard Kyra ask, “Hey, can I have the keys to the truck?”
Normally, he would have given them to her without question, but her pregnancy had progressed far past the stage where movement was easy, which made him feel even more protective of her. He could no longer look at her and forget that she was, in fact, carrying his child. Despite insisting he would lay no claim to the baby, he couldn’t help his instincts. “Are you sure you should be driving for so long in your… current state?”
Kyra glanced down at her own body with a look that let Adam know she thought he was being unreasonable. “What state am I in that prevents me from driving?”
“It’s just, if you were to get into an accident?—”
“I won’t.”
