“We’ll be right out, Ax!” I turned back to Marshall, threading my arms around his neck. “Honey. Hey. We have to take this one day at a time. There’s no other way. I can still travel. I’m just fine. People have babies here all the time.”
And die grisly deaths in childbirth, I thought immediately, not about to give voice to the inadvertent realization. But the notion clung, all the same. I thought of the long-ago night Marshall and I had discussed the probability of past lives, and my hypothetical example had been along the lines of, What if I died early and you lived to the end of your natural life? Marshall had been so upset over this example he’d made me knock on wood, just in case.
Marshall nodded, resting his forehead to mine. Back home, in Jalesville what seemed like a thousand years ago, we’d hoped to have our first baby by the Christmas of 2014. We speculated constantly about what had taken place there in the future, in our real lives – the lives we intended to reclaim, if return was possible. We assumed it was not currently possible to return, at least not until we’d determined why we were here in 1882 instead of our original timeline. Had Derrick Yancy been successful in proving ownership of Clark’s land? Had his claims been justifiable?
As of this moment, June 1882, Thomas Yancy was still alive, not shot in the back and killed by Cole Spicer, as Derrick had once alleged; perhaps Marshall and I were meant to prevent that death. We already knew our presence ensured the survival of Miles Rawley’s son, Jacob, a child he’d fathered with a prostitute named Celia Baker. The baby had not been sent east, as Celia originally intended, and had instead claimed his rightful place as a member of the Rawley family here in the nineteenth century. We believed the boy was meant to carry on the line of descendants which would one day lead to Marshall’s family in 2014. If I hadn’t arrived in 1881, prior to the boy’s birth, Marshall may very well never have existed at all.
It was enough to make my blood freeze; Marshall and I tried our best to take things one catastrophe at a time.
“Can we tell Ax?” Marshall asked, with giddy delight.
I nodded and he planted an exuberant kiss on my lips. We dressed in a hurry and found Axton waiting in the sunshine, leaning against the side of the soddy when we emerged from it, ducking to fit under the doorway. Axton grinned at the sight of us and I threw myself into his arms, squeezing hard; I wished I could give him what he wanted more than all else in life, which was Patricia’s undying love. The most wrenching part of it was that Patricia did love Ax, which he and I both knew – but the father of her child was one Cole Spicer.
I prayed that Cole, Patricia, and their son, in the company of Malcolm Carter, had reached northern Minnesota by now. When we parted ways, roughly two weeks ago, they were bound for the place where, one day, my own family would found and build the Shore Leave Cafe; just now, in 1882, the Davises were only newly established in Landon. The cafe itself, constructed on the banks of Flickertail Lake, would not exist until the 1930s. The simple remembrance of the familiar lake, and my family’s home there, inspired homesickness on a level I could only compare to dozens of tiny blades jammed between my ribs.
Axton laughed at my enthusiastic hug, rocking me side to side. “Well good morning to you too, Ruthie.”
“Guess what?” I demanded, drawing back and regarding his familiar face, so dear and handsome, the deep tan of his skin a striking contrast to the clear, dark green of his eyes. He was kind and true, earnest and sincere, a wonderful man I would handpick for any of my sisters. His ruddy brows lifted at my happy tone.
Marshall roughed up Axton’s curly hair. “Ruthie and I have some good news this morning.”
We trusted Axton implicitly; he was one of a very few who knew the truth about Marshall and I being displaced in time. What we hadn’t yet discussed with him was our desire to leave this place, ideally forever, and return home. I dreaded the conversation; the thought of leaving behind the people I’d come to know and love in 1882 filled me with increasing distress. I was dying to get to Montana Territory to see Birdie and Grant Rawley, Celia Baker and baby Jacob. My hands ached to hold Miles’s son, to hug him and observe with my own eyes that he was healthy and thriving. Knowing this would take some of the sting out of saying good-bye.
“What’s that?” Axton prompted.
Marshall winked, allowing me the floor, so to speak.
“We’re having a baby!”
Axton’s lips dropped open. “Aw, that’s wonderful!” He hugged Marshall next, and then said, with typical nineteenth-century practicality, “Well, we best find you two a preacher all that much sooner.”
Chapter Three
Montana Territory - June, 1882
WE ARRIVED AT THE RAWLEYS’ HOMESTEAD LATE THE next afternoon, the place where one day, many decades from now, Marshall’s parents, Clark and Faye, would build a new house and raise five boys. It was a distinctly incredible and unsettling experience to be here in another century – existing within the same geographical space, the same foothills in the foreground and hazy blue mountain peaks in the distance, but the house Marshall and I knew so well, the steel-pole barn and the corral and the stone fire pit around which we’d sat and roasted marshmallows and sang late into so many nights, all absent.
It seemed that at any second Clark, or Sean or Quinn or Wy, or the horses we had known and loved in a different century, like Banjo and Arrow, would come loping around the corner of the barn.
