I spread my hand across her stomach. Low, open, covering the place where our kid was growing. Seven weeks. The size of a blueberry, according to the book I’d picked up at the shop in Stevensville and stashed under the driver’s seat.
“The first extraction is in two weeks,” I said. “The spring wildflower.”
“I want to be there.” She traced a line down my forearm. “Uncapping, spinning, all of it. I want to see what your bees made from my garden.”
“Once we tell them, my mother will drive down from Billings. With the truck. You understand that.”
“The compost truck?”
“She’ll bring food. My father will bring the measuring tape. Nate will bring beer and bad advice.” I pulled her closer. “They’ll want to meet you, Flora. All of them. And they won’t leave.”
Her expression softened. “Good.”
“You say that now.”
“I say that meaning it.” She laced her fingers through mine over the baby. “I want the compost. I want your mother’sopinions about parenting and your father’s soil drainage quiz. Every loud stubborn generous piece of your family, Atlas. All of it.”
The creek ran. The bees worked the meadow. She was holding my hand on her belly, and the Morrows were coming. Everything I’d been building in silence could come into the open now.
I still had the ring my grandmother had left me. It was in a box in the back of my closet, behind the spare bee veils. I’d never had a reason to get it out.
I had a reason now.
Epilogue
FLORA
MY CLIENT HAD STOPPEDtalking about her patio redesign. She’d stopped talking entirely. She was staring past my shoulder at something behind me, and I watched her mouth open, close, and open again.
“Is that your office?” she said.
I angled the screen so she could see the full panorama: the meadow, the hive clusters along the tree line, the Sapphire Range still holding snow on its highest ridges while everything below had exploded into color. Lupine so purple it looked criminal. Blanketflower thick and blazing orange in the afternoon heat. My pollinator corridor, designed for a client who didn’t exist, running from the creek bank to the upper slope in the overlapping bloom succession I’d drawn on a sketchpad two months ago — alive now, every species doing exactly what I’d asked of it.
“That’s my office,” I said. “Also my front yard. Also, technically, a working apiary.”
“I hate you. I’m looking at a parking garage right now, Flora. A parking garage.”
“The lavender border you approved is going in next week. I’ll send progress photos.”
“From that porch.”
“From this porch.”
“I need to rethink my entire life.”
“Your patio is going to be beautiful. Focus on the patio.”
She looked at me the way people had been looking at me for weeks — half envious, half certain I’d fabricated my entire existence. I hadn’t. The porch was real, the view was real, and the bump under my sage sundress was very real and becoming harder to pass off as a large lunch.
I closed the call, shut my laptop, and stretched back in the chair. My sundress was pulled snug where the bump was winning its slow war against my wardrobe, and my hair was piled on top of my head in a clip that was losing its own fight. Four months. The nausea had backed off three weeks ago and been replaced by a hunger so specific and relentless that Atlas had started keeping a grocery list on the fridge in his block printing. The current version read: Watermelon. More pickles (jar is empty). Peanut butter (crunchy, not smooth — do not get smooth again). And at the bottom, underlined twice: Peaches. Only fresh. Do not bring home canned.
He tracked my cravings with the same focus he gave his hive inspections. I’d caught him adding to the list at five in the morning after I’d mumbled something about wanting waffles in my sleep.
He was in the extraction shed. I could hear the extractor running from here, that low mechanical hum underneath the constant drone that had become the background frequency of everything. Pine resin on the updraft. Warm grass. The faint sweetness coming off the meadow. Somewhere on the ridge, a varied thrush dropped its two-note call into the afternoon. First extraction of the season. Spring wildflower — that pale gold that tasted like the meadow smelled, that he’d drizzled acrossmy collarbone the night everything between us stopped being a secret and started being a future.
I thought about going down there. Watching him work, the way I had every day since I’d showed up on this property with binoculars and a cover story and a talent for destroying hive equipment. But the chair had me. The sun was warm on my skin. The shooting star I’d planted along the creek had spread into drifts of pale pink and my eyes stung, which was the hormones, or the pride, or both.
My phone buzzed.
