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from the kitchen, and she glanced up to see if Robert had returned. It was only Wyatt Caradon. He looked in her direction, but the vagueness in his eyes made her think it wasn’t her he was seeing.
    She wiped her tears and reached for Janie’s hand again. The flame from the lantern on the bedside table danced and swayed, casting shadowy pirouettes on the plastered walls. “When was the last time she was lucid, doctor?”
    “Late yesterday afternoon. When she came to, she recognized me. And asked for Aaron. The baby,” he added softly.
    “What did you tell her?”
    “I told her he was sleeping.”
    “Good.” She sniffed. “That was good. No need to add to her pain.”
    “That was my thinking too. But she knew, Miss Ashford. It took her a moment, but she remembered.”
    Her eyes burned as she imagined the scene. “Do you think . . .”
    Her voice broke and she cleared her throat before trying to speak again. “Do you think she’ll get better?”
    The doctor’s silence answered before he did, and in that space without words, each mile of her journey to Copper Creek seemed to stretch out like a ribbon before her. As she’d been coming steadily closer, Janie had been slipping farther away. And she hadn’t known. Surely she should have felt something. Some kind of tug on her heart. But . . . nothing.
    “There’s always a chance that Janie will improve, ma’am. Some mothers do, in these instances. But it’s going to take more than my skills to make that happen. Janie’s going to have to fight. She’s going to have to want to live. Right now her body is exhausted. The labor was long and difficult. And she and Vince have been putting everything they had into this ranch, trying to make a go of it.”
    “She wrote me when they bought cattle last fall.”
    Dr. Foster nodded. “Vince was so proud of this place, of all they’d accomplished together.”
    McKenna rinsed the cloth again and smoothed it over Janie’s cheeks and brow. Janie had always been the more delicate of the two of them, and the one with a sweeter disposition. From childhood, her tender nature had contrasted McKenna’s more stubborn one. She leaned closer. “Wake up, Janie,” she whispered, squeezing her hand again. “It’s Kenny. Please, wake up!”
    But the fever held its grip.
    McKenna pushed up and walked to the open window. A cool breeze met the dampness on her face, and she breathed its heady scent. Lavender. Planted outside the bedroom window, just as Janie had written. A knot of emotions tightened her stomach, and she wondered if she was going to be sick. Doubtful, with nothing in her stomach.
    “I buried the baby beside his father.”
    She glanced back to see Dr. Foster placing a stethoscope to Janie’s chest, his movements measured and tender. He was older—she guessed him to be well into his fifties—and he had a calm, assuring manner she found herself wanting to trust.
    “I buried him,” he continued, “on the hill, just behind the cabin. It overlooks the valley.”
    The valley where Emma took her first steps on a picnic. McKenna could picture it through the descriptions in Janie’s faithful exchanges. Oh God . . . It hurt so much inside. She looked for the hill behind the cabin but couldn’t make it out. It was so dark, being this far out from town. Living in a city the size of St. Joseph, she’d forgotten how dark the night could be, and what it felt like at times like this. When the darkness slipped inside and threatened to suffocate the slightest flicker of hope.
    Yet even in such moments she didn’t doubt that God existed. She just sometimes wondered whether He remembered that she did.
    “Janie!”
    She turned to see Dr. Foster bent over the bed—and Janie’s body shaking. Violently. She raced to the bedside.
    Still in the throes of fever, Janie arched her back, then her head, and made a gurgling sound.
    “Is she choking?”
    “No, she’s having a seizure,” Dr. Foster said with surprising calm, filling a