I nodded, grateful beyond words. As I turned to leave, Carter was already reaching for the phone, his notes spread out in front of him. I paused in the doorway, watching as he dialed, his free hand tapping a rhythm on the desk.
“Macon? It’s me. We need to talk about the security system...” His voice dropped, too low for me to catch the rest, but I didn’t need to hear it. The set of his shoulders, the focused intensity in his voice—it was enough to know he was already moving heaven and earth to keep us safe.
Me. And maybe, just maybe, the tiny life growing inside me.
I stepped into the hallway and walked through the house to the front porch, closing the door softly behind me. For along moment, I just stood there, hand pressed to my still-flat stomach, listening to the muffled sounds of Carter’s voice through the wood.
He was calling in reinforcements. Planning defenses. Making sure that no matter what happened tomorrow—no matter what the judge decided, no matter what Dennis tried—I would be protected. Not because he had to, but because I was family.
The thought made my chest ache in the best possible way.
I took a deep breath, steadying myself against the wall. The morning sickness had faded to a dull background hum, manageable if I didn’t think about it too hard. My hands had stopped shaking. And somewhere, beneath the fear and the uncertainty and the sheer overwhelming weirdness of it all, a tiny spark of hope had taken root.
Maybe, just maybe, everything would be okay.
It always amazed me that it was a five mile drive to take a vehicle to Carter’s farmhouse, but a ten minute walk across some pasture. I still hadn’t figured out why they didn’t put a road in directly between the two places.
I walked back across the ranch yard a few minutes later, gravel crunching under my boots. The late afternoon sun warmed my face, chasing away the last of the morning’s chill.
From somewhere behind the barn, I could hear Rawley’s voice—loud, commanding, probably ordering Macon to move something too heavy for one person. Normal ranch sounds. The kind of noises that had become the backdrop to my days, familiar in a way I never thought they would be.
The path to the house took me past the vegetable garden, where Jojo was bent over a row of seedlings, his hair tied back with a bandana. He waved when he saw me, face breaking into a smile that made my chest tight.
I waved back, not stopping, afraid that if I did, I’d blurt out everything—the pregnancy, the fear, the impossible hope—and never make it to Burke.
My hand drifted to my stomach, a gesture that was becoming habit. There was nothing to feel yet—no bump, no flutter, nothing but the same flat plane of my abdomen. But knowing what might be there, growing cell by cell, made my skin prickle with a weird mix of terror and wonder.
A baby. Burke’s baby. The thought still made my head spin.
I’d spent so long just trying to survive—to get through each day without breaking, to save enough money to escape, to keep my head down and my mouth shut when Dennis was on a rampage. The idea of bringing a new life into that chaos had never occurred to me. It had seemed impossible, like planning a vacation to the moon.
But now...
Now I had Burke. And the ranch. And Carter, with his matter-of-fact kindness and his own secret growing beneath his heart. I had people who would stand between me and danger without being asked. People who would tear down walls and build new ones, just to keep me safe.
People who called me family.
The word still felt strange in my mouth, like a language I was learning but hadn’t quite mastered. But Carter had said it without hesitation, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like I belonged here, with them.
A small smile formed on my lips, despite everything—despite Dennis, despite the bail hearing tomorrow, despite the fear that still lived in the hollow of my throat. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t facing my problems alone. I had Burke, and now, this tiny spark of new life connecting us forever.
The gravel path gave way to packed dirt as I approached the house. From the open window of the kitchen, I couldsmell bread baking—Jojo’s sourdough, probably, the one he’d been perfecting for weeks. The scent should have made my stomach turn, given the morning sickness, but instead, it settled something in me, a hunger that had nothing to do with food.
Burke was in there somewhere. I could feel it in the way the air seemed to charge when he was near, in the little prickle at the base of my spine that always told me when he entered a room.
He’d be working on something—fixing the sink or rewiring the porch light or just generally making himself useful in that restless way of his. Always moving, always doing, like he was afraid that if he stopped, the world might stop with him.
I needed to tell him. Today, before I lost my nerve. Before the bail hearing tomorrow sent everything spinning off course again.
But how? Hey Burke, remember that night? Well, it might have had consequences? Or maybe the direct approach: I’m pregnant, it’s yours, please don’t freak out?
Neither one seemed right. Nothing did. How did you tell someone that their life was about to change forever? That the careful plans they’d made—the ranch, the future, the slow, steady building of something that might last—were about to get blown up and rebuilt around a tiny, wailing stranger?
I paused at the bottom of the porch steps, hand on the rail. From here, I could see almost the whole property—the barn with its peeling red paint, the fields stretching toward the tree line, the distant shape of the mountains against the sky. It wasn’t much, as ranches went. Nothing like the spread Rawley had grown up on, with its thousands of acres and generations of history.
But it was solid. Real. A place where things could grow, if you gave them half a chance.
Like me. Like us. Like the tiny cluster of cells that might, someday soon, be a person with Burke’s eyes and my stubbornness, or my smile and his ridiculous sense of humor.
