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"Cash is not allowed near the ladder."

"Agreed."

"Doc gets decaf after six."

Boone turned his head. "Cruel."

"He'll survive."

"Unclear."

Outside, the light went blue over Carrow Creek.

The pasture softened into one dark stretch beyond the loading door. Frogs called along the creek. Somewhere near the house, Cash shouted something about bulls and Wyatt shouted no.

Boone's chest moved beneath my cheek.

I laughed.

He put his arm around me.

We sat on the loft floor with the Christmas boxes between us and forty years of dust beneath our boots.

"Did you know they were up here?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

Boone sighed. "I knew. I tried not to think about them, though." He fixed me with a long look. "You saw me holding that baby today," he said. "I was thinking, maybe before too long, we'll have a baby of our own to spend our Christmases with."

My throat closed. "You'd want that. With me."

"Yes," Boone said simply.

My voice came out hoarse. "I'd like that. Very much."

I had never imagined myself as the kind of woman anyone wanted to have a child with—not in any real, practical sense. I had spent three years with Derek, and not once had I pictured children, least of all my own hand inside a smaller one, or a future that was anything except escape.

But now, with Boone's arm around my shoulders and the dust of his family's stories in the air, the idea moved through me gentle as a river: a baby. One that belonged to both of us. One we could teach to untangle lights, to count fence posts, to speak the truth even when it hurt.

The ache in my chest did not feel secret or bad. It felt like a new bone growing, tender and honest.

"Would—" I started, then lost the words.

Boone squeezed my hand, waiting.

I tried again. "Would you want them to look like you, or like me?"

He considered, which was not a stalling tactic. Boone considered everything. "Both," he said. "Yours for the parts that work better small. Mine for the parts that work better large."

Biscuit barked downstairs, clearly wanting to join in, and Boone laughed outright, a full happy sound that vibrated into my ribs. His smiles weren't such rare occurrences anymore, it seemed.

We sat a while longer, with the Christmas boxes between us and the dusk settling over the valley. The rest of the world seemed a hundred miles away. If Cash and Wyatt yelled themselves hoarse about livestock economics, if Doc grew philosophical on the subject of pie, I only registered it as background—the ground-level hum of a place that no longer felt contingent or temporary, but mine.

I looked at Boone, silhouetted against twilight, and realized that I now trusted silence for the first time in my life. Not as a threat or a precursor to danger, but as something earned, inhabited, and safe.

Boone finally shifted. "Suppose we should get down. There's work tomorrow."

"You're right, Daddy," I said. "And the day after that."

We climbed down and walked outside. The ranch lay blue beneath the first stars. It looked like home.