Page 54 of She Autumn Be Mine

“Jake. She’s here, son.” Dot used the careful voice she took on around scared animals. “She arrived a few minutes ago and stood on the porch and couldn’t get one word out, crying. But she’s safe, the baby’s safe—they’re out in the kid barn.” She paused. “She ran, Jake. But all that matters is she ran back home to us.”

The search had found my wife exactly one step behind her own decision. I quickly filled Ash and the sheriff in.

“I’ll drive, lights off so she doesn’t spook,” Gavin said.

When we arrived, my mother had every light in the farmhouse burning bright, as if lighting the way home for lost things, or people. Down the fence line, Macho stood facing the yard in the dusk, ears up, the moment I got out of the car. I didn’t have time for him. I ran straight to the kid barn.

Behind me Mom welcomed the Sheriff in for a cup of tea, complaining that she hadn’t had mail service the past week. “I wondered if you’d heard anything about Barry, the courier being ill?”

I tuned them out and ran for the kid barn, and stopped dead in the doorway.

They were in the middle pen. Autumn sat cross-legged with our son in her lap, and between his little hands—hers wrapped around them, steadying his—was a bottle. On the other end of it, a tail going like a windshield wiper, was Bah.

"Hold still, sweetie. She's hungry, see?" Autumn's voice sounded worn to threads. "You have to be patient with the little ones. That's how the McCalls do it. They just keep showing up with the bottle till you're strong."

I sucked in a breath. Years ago, in this same barn, I'd given a bottle to a dying goat—Macho. And now my son was here. My mother had put them out here on purpose, and my knees understood it before I did, because I had to put a hand on the pen rail to stay standing.

"Autumn."

Her head came up. Straw in her hair, eyes swollen. Stetson smiled around the bottle. "Dada."

That one word nearly finished me where I stood.

I'd rehearsed being calm the whole drive. Come easy, my mother had said not to spook her off, and I'd promised, and I made it about four steps into that pen before two days without them burned through every bit of it.

My words came out, cracked down the middle, and rising. "Two days, Autumn. I called every hospital between here and the interstate. I stood in a mess hall watching the whole county grid-search for my family, and every hour that phone didn't ring I worried I’d be planning your funeral." My voice broke and I let it, because she deserved the truth of what it cost me, all of it. "And you want to know the worst thing I found? It wasn't the note. I found the can, Autumn, hiding behind the flour. Your hidden stash. Empty."

“I know. I’m sorry.”

"You kept that can this whole time." My eyes burned and I didn't care. "Packed and ready to leave if you needed. So tell me straight, sweetheart, because I can survive anything except not knowing—was some part of you always halfway out the door even after we married and after you said you trusted me?"

She set the bottle down and got Stetson settled in the straw, and when she stood and faced me, she didn't flinch from any of it. "No, Jake. That can is older than you. I started it at nineteen, and I have kept one behind the flour ever since, because that’s what my mother taught me." Her chin trembled. "It was never aimed at you. It was aimed at the whole world. I married you and thought I’d never need it again."

“If you’re truly with me in this marriage, then you don’t need it, honey. You need me, that’s all. Through the hard times, we face them together. Remember our vows?" I crossed the last of the pen, and stopped a foot from her, shaking and done pretending otherwise. "Because I can't do that again. Being without you and him wrecked me. You want to run? Run. But you look me in the eye right now and know what you're running from, because it's not a babysitter and it's not a convenient marriage. It's a man who would search to the end of the earth for you, however long it took. You could've gone ocean to ocean and I'd have been one town behind you the rest of my life and I still wouldn't have given up."

"I know." The tears spilled over and she let them. "Jake, I'm so sorry. I left here with every intention of getting lost so Marlene would never see Stetson again." She peeked down at our son, and her face crumpled and rebuilt itself. "And then in that motel, Stetson wouldn't sleep. He kept crying and holding up that little wooden goat your dad whittled—wouldn't let go of a piece of your family in his fist like it was his, because it is his. I sat there and understood I wasn't protecting him from Marlene. I was stealing him from you. From all of you." She swallowed hard. "Running is playing Marlene's game. Isolated is the only way she wins. Coming home is the counterattack. I'm a McCall now. Stetson too, even if he doesn't have your last name yet."

"Yet," I said, hoarse.

"Yet," she agreed. “We ran. But we ran back, all the way home.”

She came into me then—or I pulled her—and Stetson and Bah squawked at the disruption. I wrapped my wife up and held on so hard she yelped, my face buried in her wild hair, two days of terror leaving my body in one long shudder that I didn't bother to hide from her. Let her feel it. Let her know exactly what she meant to me.

"There’s a first I’ve been saving. A big one. Do you want to know what?" I asked into her hair.

"Yes."

"I love you."

Her breath jolted, and I said it again, slower, so there'd be no mistake the rest of our lives about when and where and how much I meant it.

"I love you, Autumn McCall. Since a couch and a camera shutter, when you took my photo with Stetson sleeping on my chest. I have loved you through a year of 'just friends,' and I will love you through everything an Eaton can throw our way—as long as I'm on the list of what you stay for. Every single time."

The barn light glistened in her eyes. The last wall of her defense came down without a sound.

"I love you too. For me, I think it started the same exact night, when you held my son in your protective arms. I've been terrified every day since that I’d lose. But I'm done being scared of love. You're the reason the running's broken, Jake. You broke my best skill and built me a better one."

"Dada!" Stetson hollered, arms up, finished being left out. I brought him onto my hip, and inhaled his baby scent. Bah screamed the outrage of an interrupted dinner, and my wife laughed and cried at all of it. For a fragile second, I wondered if everything would be okay now. The only thing I had left was hope that everything in my world stood right here with me where it belonged.