That protective gesture, palm low, fingers spread, a dozen times over the past week, always when she thought she was unobserved. In the garden, on the steps, walking to her car. Constant. Unconscious.
The fatigue. She ran full throttle until the early afternoon and then she’d flag all at once. She’d sit on the cabin steps andclose her eyes and breathe with the careful rhythm of someone managing nausea through sheer will.
One morning I was rendering wax in the extraction shed and she walked in and walked straight back out, her face gone gray-green. “Just a head rush,” she said when I came after her. She was perched on an overturned crate taking small sips of water, knuckles white around the bottle.
When I’d offered her coffee because she’d run out of tea, she’d taken it with a tight smile and barely touched it. The third time, she lifted the mug, went very still, and set it down. Clutched her peppermint thermos instead and pretended nothing had happened.
She was pregnant.
I sat down on the porch step. Missed it the first time, caught the edge, sat down hard enough to rattle my teeth. The colonies were working the meadow. The creek was running. Everything the same as five minutes ago except the ground had shifted under my whole life.
She was pregnant and she’d come to find me. My degree, my family, Nate’s name — she’d read them in a file. A donor catalogue. Because I’d been a donor, eight years ago, a clinic in Bozeman, textbook money that paid for one semester and then I’d never thought about it again.
She’d thought about it. She’d picked me from a list, driven nine hours, tripped over my hive boxes, and invented a job to stay.
I pressed my palms flat on my knees. My hands were shaking.
The woman who argued with sketches of yarrow and flushed pink when I said her name. She was carrying my child. And every deflection, every too-bright laugh, every time she’d almost said the real thing and swallowed it back — she was terrified of losing what we’d built.
I knew the feeling.
If I asked her directly, she’d bolt. I’d seen it: her whole body tensing at a question that cut too close, the sudden pivot to soil composition, the brightness dialed up to cover the flinch. I asked, she ran, she packed the rental, and I’d spend the rest of my life knowing I’d had her and lost her because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
So I wouldn’t ask. I’d wait, the way I waited for a new colony to settle: patient, steady, giving it room to choose. And I’d build while I waited.
I SWAPPED OUT THE REGULARfor decaf. She didn’t always drink my coffee. She had her own tea most days. But when she ran out, when she forgot her thermos, when the cold came in hard enough that she’d accept whatever I offered, I wanted it to be safe for her. I set the decaf on the counter and didn’t mention it.
She took a cup when the temperature dropped. Drank it slowly, both hands wrapped around the mug. Didn’t wince. Didn’t set it aside. “This is better than usual,” she said, surprised.
“I tried a different roast. The dark stuff was getting old.”
She looked at me over the rim. Held the look a beat longer than coffee deserved. “Well. I approve.”
I drove to town alone the next day. Told her I had a delivery to make. Parked on the side street so her rental, still at my place, wouldn’t be visible from the front and walked in through the back of the general store.
Connie’s vitamin aisle was four shelves of aspirin, cold medicine, and Band-Aids. The prenatal supplements were on the bottom shelf, one brand, the bottle dusty. I picked it up. Held it. My pulse loud in my ears.
“That for you?” Connie asked from behind me. She’d appeared silently. Standard Connie.
“Just picking up a few things.”
“Mm-hm.” She looked at the bottle. Looked at me. Her face went soft in a way I’d never seen from her, stripped of the dry commentary, almost gentle. She rang it up with a box of ginger tea and a jar of ginger preserves and put them in a bag without a word.
I set the vitamins in my bathroom cabinet behind the aspirin. Where they’d sit until she found them, or until I found a way to tell her I knew without losing her.
I climbed the loft ladder after she left. The space had been storage since I’d built the cabin: spare frames, old equipment, a broken smoker, boxes I’d meant to sort through and never had. I started carrying it down. Load by load, clearing the room. The floor underneath was rough-cut pine. I swept it. Ran my hand across the boards, checking for splinters that would need sanding. Good shape. South wall was solid, but the right place for a window. Big enough.
I didn’t let myself say what it was for. Not yet.
SHE LEFT THE WAY SHEalways did. A kiss at my door that started quick and turned slow, her palm flat on my chest, my hand on her hip. She pulled back just enough to meet my eyes, warm, brown, full of everything she was still too scared to say, and then she turned and walked to the car with her keys in her hand.
“See you in the morning?” she asked. The question she still asked every night. As if the answer were in doubt.
“I’ll be on the porch. And the coffee will be the good kind.”
She laughed. Soft, surprised, the kind of laugh that wasn’t for show. She got in the rental and pulled down the drive.
I stood in the doorway and watched her go. Taillights through the pines, red, dimming. Her engine thinning to nothing. The mountain filled back in: creek water, wind, the day’s last birdsong settling in the conifers.
