Chapter 18: Moonlight spills through the half-finished nursery windows as Wade's calloused hands slide up Cass's bare thighs, his mouth hot on her neck while they listen to June's quiet breaths through the monitor - every touch is stolen and desperate, their bodies relearning each other in frantic whispers against skin still marked by childbirth.
The silence was the thing that woke her. Not a cry, not a whimper, not the staticky rustle of the baby monitor. Just… silence. Cass blinked into the dark, her brain foggy with a fatigue so deep it felt geological. She’d been dreaming of typewriter keys sticking, of sentences melting into nonsense. The digital clock on the nightstand glowed 3:17 AM. June had been down since eleven. That was… four hours. An impossible stretch.
She lay perfectly still, waiting for the other shoe to drop. From the other side of the bed, Wade’s breathing was a slow, steady rhythm. He was on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes. In the sliver of light from the hallway nightlight, she could see the dark fan of his lashes against his cheek, the stubble shading his jaw. He looked younger in sleep, the usual guarded tension smoothed away.
Careful not to disturb him, she slid out from under the quilt and padded across the cool wooden floor to the crib. June was a small, lumpen mound under her cotton blanket, her rosebud mouth slightly open, her chest rising and falling in a peaceful tide. Cass watched her for a full minute, mesmerized by the simple miracle of uninterrupted sleep. A wild, giddy hope bloomed in her chest. Maybe this was it. The turning point.
Her body ached in a dozen different places—a deep throb in her abdomen, a stiffness in her shoulders from hunching over to nurse, a phantom pulsation in her cracked nipples. But beneath the fatigue was a buzzing awareness, a sense of being contained within her own skin again, not just a vessel for milk and worry. She needed a shower. A long, hot, silent one.
She closed the bedroom door softly and went into the bathroom. She turned the water as hot as she could stand and stepped under the stream, letting it pound the knots from her neck and back. The steam filled the room, fogging the mirror, carrying the clean scent of the plain soap she used. She washed her hair, scrubbing her scalp until it tingled, and for the first time in months, she didn’t rush. The monitor, sitting dry on the sink, remained quiet.
When she turned the water off, the silence was profound. She toweled her hair, wiped a clear circle on the mirror, and looked at herself. Dark smudges still lived under her eyes, but her cheekbones seemed less sharp. The frantic, hunted look she’d carried since returning home had softened, replaced by something more weary, more settled. She slipped into a clean, thin cotton nightgown, one she’d bought in the city and never worn here—too impractical, too soft. It felt like a secret against her skin.
Back in the bedroom, Wade had shifted. He was on his side now, facing her side of the bed, the sheets tangled around his waist. The monitor light winked a steady green. She stood there, dripping hair darkening the shoulders of her gown, watching the two of them sleep. A fierce, protective love for June clenched in her chest. For Wade, it was something more complicated, a vine that had grown around her ribs, sturdy and inescapable.
She climbed back into bed, the springs creaking softly. Wade’s eyes opened. Not startled, just a slow, drowsy unveiling. He looked from her damp hair to the monitor and back again, his voice a sleep-roughened whisper. “She out?”
“Four hours and counting.”
A slow smile touched his mouth. “Holy hell.” He reached out, his fingers finding a damp strand of her hair and tucking it behind her ear. The calluses on his thumb brushed her cheek. “You’re clean. You smell like… outside. After rain.”
“It’s just soap.”
“It’s not.” His hand didn’t retreat. It cupped the side of her face, his thumb tracing the arch of her cheekbone. The intimacy of the touch, in the deep quiet dark, was louder than any words. The distance between them on the mattress suddenly felt vast and stupid. She shifted toward him an inch. He closed the rest of the gap.
His kiss was warm and languid, tasting of sleep. It was not the frantic, desperate coupling of their first time, born of anger and fear and a need to feel alive. This was slow exploration. A rediscovery. His hands mapped her through the thin cotton—the curve of her waist, the swell of her hip, the still-soft plane of her belly. She flinched, just slightly, when his palm pressed there.
“Sorry,” he murmured against her lips.
“It’s okay. It’s just… tender.”
He moved his hand to the small of her back, pulling her closer. “Tell me what’s okay.”
So she did. With whispers and guided touches, she showed him. His breathing grew ragged as he learned the new landscape of her body, the changes wrought by motherhood. He was painfully gentle, achingly patient, until her own patience frayed. She hooked a leg over his hip, pulling him into her, a low gasp escaping her as they joined. It was different. A deeper, fuller ache, a sense of reclamation.
Afterwards, they lay tangled, sweat cooling on their skin. His forehead rested against her temple. The monitor remained silent. Cass traced the line of his shoulder blade with her fingertip.
“My mom called,” she said into the dark. The words just came out, unexpected, carried on the wave of closeness.
His body stilled. “When?”
“The day you brought June home. While you were building the crib.”
He waited. She could feel him listening with his whole body.
“He’s in rehab. In Lubbock. Has been for two months. Going to meetings. Talking.” She let out a short, breathy sound that wasn’t a laugh. “Supposedly.”
Wade was silent for a long time. “What do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth. “It feels like a trap. Like hope is the bait.”
“He’s a sick man, Cass. Sick people can get treatment.”
“You sound like a brochure.”
“I sound like a man who’s seen a few things,” he said, his voice low. “I’m not saying forgive him. I’m saying… information is just information. It doesn’t obligate you to anything.”
She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling. “He mentioned my brother. My mom said he’s talking about him.”
Wade’s hand found hers, lacing their fingers together. “That’s big.”
“Is it? Or is it just more words?” She turned her head to look at him. In the faint light, his expression was grave. “I spent so long trying to get away from his words. The cruel ones, the sweet ones. They were all just different kinds of rope.”
“So don’t listen.” He brought their joined hands to his lips, kissed her knuckles. “Your life is here. This room. That crib. The book royalties paying for the goddamn attic insulation.” A faint grin. “Me.”
A real smile touched her lips. “You’re pretty far down the list, Collins.”
“Ouch.” He shifted, propping himself up on an elbow to look down at her. “Seriously. You control the gate. He doesn’t get a key just because he mailed you a sorry from Lubbock.”
June made a soft, snuffling sound over the monitor. They both froze, listening. It was just a sleep sound. The gentle sigh of infant dreams.
Cass reached up, touched the side of his face. “When did you get so smart?”
“Around the time I fell in love with a stubborn writer who looked at me like I was something she scraped off her boot.” He kissed her, soft and lingering. “Get some sleep. She’s gonna be up at five wanting breakfast, and I’ve got to fix the tractor before the rain comes.”
He settled back, pulling her against him, her back to his chest. His warmth surrounded her. The last thing she felt before sleep pulled her under was the solid, steady beat of his heart against her spine, a counter-rhythm to the silent green light of the monitor, keeping watch over their fragile, sleeping peace. The past was in Lubbock, talking. The future was a tractor repair and a 5 AM feeding. And for now, in the deep dark, the present was enough.e,
And for now, in the deep dark, the present was enough. It had to be, because the present became a relentless, beautiful engine, chewing through days and nights with a rhythm all its own. June’s sleep stretches lengthened, then contracted with teeth, then settled into a predictable pattern. Cass wrote during the naps, longhand in a series of cheap notebooks, the sentences messy and urgent. She wrote about silence, about the weight of a sleeping child, about the geometry of a man’s shoulders in dawn light. She mailed a proposal to her old editor, a collection of linked essays titled Hard Ground.
“They want it,” she said, holding the letter in the kitchen while Wade tried to spoon oatmeal into a resistant June. Her voice was flat, disbelieving.
Wade looked up, oatmeal dripping from the spoon. “Of course they do. What’s it about?”
“Here. This. All of it.” She waved a hand, encompassing the kitchen, the fields, him. “The terror and the dirt and the… the stupid, gorgeous hope of planting something.”
A slow grin spread across his face. “So I’m in it?”
“You’re the stubborn, metaphorical bedrock,” she said, a real smile breaking through. “Now clean your daughter’s face. She looks like a plasterer’s apprentice.”
The advance wasn’t huge, but it felt like a fortune mined from her own spine. They used it to drill a new well. Wade bought five bred heifers at auction, their hides a mosaic of browns and whites, their voices lowing across the fenced pasture he’d built himself, post by post. The forty acres hummed with new purpose. A quarter was put into hay, another into a market garden Cass tended, selling tomatoes and okra at a roadside stand.
June learned to walk, then run, her toddler’s body a determined stagger across the uneven yard. She became a fixture at the neighbor’s, the Garritys, whose daughter Jessica was born three days after her. The two were inseparable, a blur of giggles and shared popsicles on the Garritys’ porch swing. “It’s good,” Ellen Garrity told Cass, handing her a glass of sweet tea. “Gives you a breathin’ spell. And Lord knows, Jess needs the wildness June brings.”
Cass would watch them sometimes, her chest tight with a love so fierce it bordered on pain. This was the childhood she’d wanted for her brother. This simple, uncomplicated alliance. She’d write in the loft above the barn while they played below, the sound of their games a gentle soundtrack to her work.
Wade finished the loft the summer June turned three. He’d insulated it, sheetrocked the walls, put in a proper window that looked west over the fields. It was a clean, sun-washed space, smelling of sawdust and possibility. “Your office,” he said, presenting it with a sweep of his arm, his hat tipped back. “No more scribbling at the kitchen table. A real writer’s room.”
She climbed the ladder and stood in the center of the empty room, the late afternoon light painting a golden rectangle on the pine floor. She could see her entire world from that window. “It’s perfect.”
He climbed up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, his chin on her shoulder. “Good. Because I’m sick of tripping over your notebooks.”
She elbowed him gently. “Liar.”
The publication of Hard Ground was a quiet event in the wider world, but a seismic one at home. A box of author copies arrived. Cass opened it on the porch, June leaning against her leg. She pulled out a book, her book, the cover a stark, beautiful photograph of cracked earth yielding a single green shoot. Her name was printed beneath the title. Cassidy McAllister.
She traced the letters with her finger. It was her name. Her real one. Not the one she’d tried on in New York. This was the name that had cowered in the farmhouse, that had fled, that had come back broken. It was hers again, reclaimed.
Wade took a copy to the barn, to the hardware store, leaving it casually on counters. Old man Henson at the feed store picked it up, squinted at the cover, then at Wade. “Your Cass wrote this?”
“She did.”
He grunted, thumbing the pages. “Ain’t gonna be about feelin’s and such, is it?”
“It’s about dirt,” Wade said, which was true, in a way.
Henson bought two copies.
The local paper, the one that had ignored her return, ran a small piece. Local Author Mines Home Soil for National Prize. Cass read it once, then used it to line the bottom of June’s hamster cage. The work was the thing. The work, and the life growing around it.
One morning, she stood at the new kitchen window, watching Wade lead the heifers to a fresh paddock. The smell of the coffee in her hand, usually a comfort, suddenly seemed acrid and invasive. A deep, visceral wave of wrongness rolled through her. She set the mug down hard, the liquid sloshing over the rim.
Her cycle was late. Only by a few days, but her body had become a reliable clock after June’s birth. This was different. This was a familiar, internal tilting of the world. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass.
Wade came in an hour later, stomping mud off his boots. “Gonna need to fix the fence on the north side. Those girls are too damn clever.” He stopped, seeing her face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, her voice carefully even. She was calculating months in her head. A spring baby. June would be four. “I need to go into town. Can you watch June?”
He studied her, his eyes missing nothing. “Cass.”
“I need a test. From the pharmacy.” The words hung between them, blunt and simple.
His breath caught, just slightly. He took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair. He looked at her, then at the hallway where the sounds of June singing to her dolls drifted. A slow, profound wonder dawned on his face, followed immediately by a flicker of the old fear. The blood on the floorboards. The operating room light.
“Okay,” he said, his voice rough. He stepped closer, his hands finding her hips. “We’ll go together. All three of us.”
The test, with its stark, blue plus sign, confirmed what her body already knew. That evening, after June was asleep, they sat on the porch steps. The sky was a vast bowl of stars, the kind you only see miles from a town’s glow. He held her hand, his thumb rubbing circles on her palm.
“A boy,” he said suddenly, the words not a question but a declaration to the night.
She looked at him. “How do you know?”
“I just do.” He smiled, a quiet, certain thing. “He’ll help me with the north fence.”
She laughed, a soft exhale of release. The fear was still there, a cold pebble in her gut, but it was surrounded now by this warmth, this staggering, expansive hope. Inside, through the window, they could see the clean lines of the finished loft above the barn, a solid shape against the indigo night. It was no longer just an office. It was a watchtower. A promise. A place to see the future coming from a long way off.