Caleb split kindling at the side of the woodshed, the axe falling steady and even, while Nell stood a few feet off with one hand braced at the small of her back, seven months gone and heavier on her feet than she cared to admit most days.

“You could sit,” Caleb said, not looking up from the block.

“I could,” Nell said. “And I’ll do it the moment I’m tired of standing, not one moment before that, so you needn’t keep offering.”

“Just making the offer available,” he said. “A man’s allowed that much.”

Over by the chopping block, Thomas stood with a hatchet gripped in both small hands, far too heavy an implement for a boy not yet five, working with fierce concentration at a length of cedar that refused to yield to him no matter how many times he brought the blade down against it.

“You’re not swinging it right,” Silas said, standing close behind him with the splitting axe resting easy against his own shoulder. “Let the weight of the head do the work. You’re fighting it instead of letting it fall.”

“It won’t split,” Thomas said, breathless with the effort of it.

“It will,” Silas said. “Cedar’s stubborn, same as some people I could name. Try it again, slower this time.”

Thomas tried it again, slower. The hatchet bit a little deeper this time, though the wood still held.

“There,” Silas said, as though the boy had accomplished something considerably more impressive than a partial cut. “That’s proper work, that is.”

“It didn’t even split,” Thomas said, frowning down at the wood.

“Didn’t say it split,” Silas said. “Said it was proper work. Splitting comes later, once you’ve learned the proper part first.”

Through the kitchen window, Nell could see Hannah at the table, a bowl of apples in front of her, the knife moving quick and practiced through peel after peel in one long unbroken curl the way she’d always done it. At the side window sat Nell’s mother, her embroidery hoop in her lap, needle moving slow and steady, the picture of a woman who had finally, after seventy years and one long journey west, found somewhere she meant to stay.

“She looks well,” Caleb said, following Nell’s gaze.

“She does,” Nell said. “Better than I’ve seen her look since before Father died. I still can’t quite believe she sold the Chicago house.”

“A month after the wedding,” Caleb said. “I remember. You cried reading that letter.”

“I did not cry.”

“You cried,” Caleb said, setting the axe aside and reaching for another length of wood. “I was standing right beside you.”

“I was moved,” Nell said. “There’s a difference.”

A buckboard’s wheels sounded on the lane, and both of them turned to watch it come up from the east, Josephine at the reins, and beside her a broad-shouldered man with pale hair and a serious, careful face that broke into something warmer the moment he caught sight of the yard ahead of him.

“Lars,” Caleb said, lifting a hand in greeting.

“Caleb.” Lars swung down from the buckboard first and came around to hand Josephine down after him, his accent still carrying the measure of a man who’d learned English later in his life and minded every word of it. “You are well? Nell, you are looking very well, though I think perhaps you would rather not be told so this far along.”

“I’ll allow it from you,” Nell said, smiling. “You’re the only man in this county who says it without sounding like he’s bracing for me to argue.”

“I have learned,” Lars said, “that a woman seven months along does not require my opinion so much as my patience, and I have plenty of the second to offer even when I am short on the first.”

“He’s learned a great deal,” Josephine said, taking his arm, something easy and fond in the way she said it. “Faster than most men manage in twice the time.”

***

Supper that evening ran long and loud, the table crowded with more chairs than the kitchen had ever comfortably held, Thomas presiding over his own small corner of it with the gravity of a boy who considered himself nearly grown. Doyle had also stopped by on his way home from town to share the meal the way he’d taken to doing most Sundays now.

“There’s a letter,” Hannah said, once the plates had mostly cleared, drawing a folded page from her apron pocket. “From Lila. Came in on yesterday’s stage.”

“Read it,” Nell said. “All of it.”

Hannah unfolded the letter and read, her voice warm with the pleasure of the news even before she’d gotten properly into it.

“She’s married,” Hannah said. “A railroad clerk, name of Whitfield, steady sort by the sound of it. They’ve three rooms above a shop in Cheyenne, small but her own, she says, and she sounds prouder of those three rooms than most women sound of a mansion.” Hannah scanned further down the page. “Anna’s come up from Denver to live with them. Found work at a dressmaker’s there, good, honest work, and Lila says her sister’s laughing again, properly laughing, for the first time since it all happened.”

“That’s fine news,” Josephine said, something in her own face going soft at hearing it.

“It is,” Nell agreed. “I’m glad of it, every word.”

After supper, once the dishes had been cleared and the younger ones settled toward bed, Caleb walked out into the lower pasture with Nell on one side and Josephine on the other, the evening still holding some warmth in it despite the season turning.

“Cargill wrote,” Josephine said once they’d walked far enough that the house had dropped behind them. “Word came to Mrs. Solberg’s place two days back, and I’ve been carrying it since, waiting on a proper moment to tell you both.”

“Go on,” Caleb said.

“Jasper won’t be paroled,” Josephine said. “Not this year, not any year the board’s willing to consider it, near as Cargill could tell. Garrett’s still serving out his twenty at Cheyenne. Halloran’s there too, same facility, though Cargill says they’re kept well apart from one another.”

Caleb was quiet a long moment, walking, the grass whispering underfoot in the cooling evening air.

“I think of him sometimes,” he said, finally, “not the man on that porch with a revolver at Nell’s temple. The other one. Twelve years old in a hayloft back in Texas, teaching me to throw a knife at a fence post until I could hit it three times running. Fourteen, the night my mother died, sitting beside me on the porch steps till dawn because neither of us could stand to be alone with it.”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t forgive what he did. I don’t imagine I ever will, not fully. But I’ve decided I’m allowed to keep that boy separate from the man he became, and grieve one without excusing the other.”

“That seems a wise way to carry it,” Josephine said.

“It’s the only way I’ve found that doesn’t eat a man alive from the inside,” Caleb admitted.

They walked on a while in comfortable quiet, until they reached the corner post where the fence turned north, and Nell stopped there, one hand resting against the worn wood, the other still braced at her back.

“If it’s a boy,” she said, “I’d like to call him John. After your father.”

Caleb turned to look at her. “You never met my father.”

“No,” Nell said, “but I’ve heard you speak of him enough times now, riding two hundred miles with you against his coat, smelling of leather and wood smoke, to feel I know something true of him. I’d like our son to carry that, if we’re given a son.”

“And if it’s a girl,” Caleb said.

“Margaret,” Nell said. “After my mother.”

Caleb reached over and took her hand, the evening light gone soft and gold around them both.

“Either one,” he said, “would be a fine name to grow into.”

That night, once the house had gone quiet and the lamps had been turned low, Caleb found Nell standing at the kitchen window, looking out over the dark yard the way she had a hundred times before, in a hundred different seasons of her life in this house.

He crossed to her and set his hand flat against the curve of her belly, and felt, after a moment, the small, sure movement beneath his palm.

“There,” he said, quiet, something close to wonder still in his voice even after seven months of feeling it.

“There,” Nell agreed, covering his hand with her own.

He turned her toward him then, slow, and kissed her the way he’d kissed her once at a creek bank two and a half years before, unhurried, certain, a lantern burning low beside them and a whole hard morning finally behind them both.

“Six o’clock tomorrow,” she said, when he drew back, resting her forehead against his. “Same as it’s been every morning since the first one, coffee on, you at the stove before I’m properly down the stairs.”

“Same as it’ll be every morning after that too,” Caleb said, “for as long as either of us has a say in the matter.”