I flush.
She presses her hand to her face. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
I wince. “I think I started it.”
She glances sideways at me. “Shall we get the eggs and pretend that I didn’t put my foot in my mouth?”
A gracious rescue from an awkward moment. My cheeks burn the whole way to the coop, and I don’t look back at Zane again.
Luna grabs a cardboard egg carton from the outbuilding, and it’s good that she did, because there’s a full dozen this morning.
I hold the carton as she finds all the freshly laid eggs. Bellamy races around my legs, running away from the chickens, hiding, but then also peeking through between my knees, secretly wanting to make friends with the mini dinosaurs.
“Bye bye,” she says tremulously when we leave the pen.
And then, grateful that she’s not surrounded by sharp beaks anymore, she takes off running, racing ahead of us.
Zane’s truck is gone now, so she has free rein over the space between the barns and the greenhouses and all the way up to the house.
It’s forty or fifty yards, maybe more. Farther than I've let her be from me in her entire life.
Luna follows my eyes. "She's fine."
"I know." My voice comes out tighter than I mean it to. "I'm not… I know. I'm just not used to it."
“I remember when my kids were that little. It gets easier as they get older. And then they join the rodeo and it gets more terrifying again.”
I laugh weakly. “Noted.”
We walk the eggs up to the house, where Luna disappears to put them in the kitchen, and I stay on the porch to be a vigilant mother. I can’t help it, and anything could happen in an instant.
Bellamy circles in a wide loop, checking that I'm watching her, because she’s unfortunately vigilant too, and then bolts off again.
All the way to the barn, where she squats and looks at a rock on the gravel drive.
On the compound, she was never allowed more than five feet away from me. I always had to be able to scoop her up, because Derek would turn on her if she got underfoot.
I can hear him now, the meanness in his voice, the way he’d take that out on me. I can hear his cruel tone ringing in my ears.
I can taste the sharp copper of regret.
"Hope?”
I startle. Luna’s back on the porch with me, and she’s holding out a glass of water. My fingers tremble as I take it.
"You all right?"
“Yep.” Too fast. I try again, softer. "Just thinking about how much space she has here. She's not used to it.”
“It’s a lot to adjust to. But it seems good for her.”
And I’m going to take her away from it.
Nausea rises, sharply, as it has a few times already. I breathe through my nose and take a sip of water, and it passes. Mostly. I set the glass down before my hand can shake.
I’m going to have to take her away, sooner than later. And the next place I stop, I’m going to have to come up with a better backstory. Something simpler and more sympathetic than the truth. I’ll be a widow.
Beside me, I can feel Luna looking at me. Wanting to ask questions about why Bellamy couldn’t run around on Derek’s homestead. I’ve told her too much already, revealed too much.
