The word made his heart catch in his chest.A dad.He was.And Ellie was a mother.Another thing they had in common was that they’d walked into that hospital as two single people and walked out as parents.
Silence settled between them, the only sound the pop of his engine as it cooled.“This is really beautiful,” she whispered.
“Yeah.It gives me kind of a thrill, having a piece of this.”
She looked sad, and he felt something shift inside him.
“It’s really cool that you have this,” she said.
He saw himself through her eyes then.A man who wanted to grab hold of something lasting because of everything he hadn’t had way back then, and she wasn’t really wrong.
He’d bought this place partly to flex his newfound success.Hell, it was part of why he’d come back to this town in the first place.
But now his motivation had shifted.Marjorie had shifted his purpose.
“She’s going to love playing here,” he said.
Suddenly, this place meant something else.It was different, and so was he.He didn’t care if he was better than anyone else.He just cared that his little girl—yeah, his little girl—had the best place to play.“This is going to be like a magic portal,” he said.
“A fairy forest,” she agreed, immediately picking up his mood.
“She’s going to be able to run all around here, bring her friends.”
“And no one will get mad when they’re noisy,” she said.
“And it won’t be embarrassing because it’s a mess.”
“And we won’t make her vacuum when they’re here.Or do her piano lessons or her ballet drills.”
“And there will always be food in the pantry.”
This was like making vows.The real creation of a family, then and there, in the presence of the petrified trees.
It was a deep, meaningful moment that he felt all the way down to his bones.
“Forever and ever,” she said.
“Hell yeah,” he said.
He put the truck back into drive, and they continued down to his main pasture, where most of the cattle were.
He drove the truck right through the field and parked it just a few feet away from the herd.
He took the car seat out of the truck as she got out the picnic basket, and he set Marjorie in her car seat in the truck bed.He and Ellie sat on the tailgate, situating the basket between them.
“Did you want with mustard or without?”she asked, holding a choice of two sandwiches out to him.
“With, thank you.”
“I had a feeling.If you wanted without I was going to be in trouble.Because I don’t like it.”
He laughed.“Why didn’t you just ask?”
She wrinkled her nose, and she was just so cute, it actually made him ache.“I don’t know.”
“You’re a silly thing,” he said.
The sun was warm, and the view was perfect.
