Chapter 1: Six Weeks and Counting

Moira

The first bite was too tart on an empty stomach, but Moira Huang bit off a chunk again anyway. She liked green apples, had always liked them, but apparently the baby had no interest in letting her stop eating them.

Somewhere down the west drive, an engine hummed low behind the trees, too early for deliveries, too slow for the ranch staff, and the baby gave one hard, disapproving roll beneath her ribs. Moira paused with the apple halfway to her mouth. Then the sound thinned to nothing, and the unease went with it.

Moira sat at the kitchen table, sketchbook open across her lap. Eight weeks more of that. Eight weeks of letting her body decide things she would once have considered for herself: when to eat, when to stop, when to leave a room. In Seattle she’d have minded. Here she didn’t have the energy to.

Outside the kitchen window, the meadow was still more black than gray, the aspens up along the ridge gold. On Lily’s stove, the kettle had started its low complaint, not a whistle yet.

Lily stood at the counter in the reading lamp’s one warm circle, patiently working a piece of dough between her palms. Bao dough, pale and soft, rising a little under her fingers each time she pressed it flat. Lily’s hands moved, sure and unhurried. The morning looked possible when Lily handled it like that.

On the back burner, a pot of jook had been going since Kemi came down and left for the lodge, the rice breaking apart slowly into something Moira’s stomach craved at six in the morning.

“That’s the third green one I’ve watched disappear,” her sister said, not turning around.

Moira looked at the apple core in her hand.

“Yeah, well. Tell that to the tenant. She wants them tart and she wants them now.”

“Mrs. Patel’s going to set a bag aside with your name on it.”

“She already does. She underlines my name on the tape.”

“At least you’re not sending me into town for pickles at midnight.”

A white lodge shuttle bumped into view between the aspens, turned toward the main house, and disappeared again. The first guests, probably.

Moira’s left hand found the small of her back, thumb pressing into the muscle that had started aching sometime around week twenty-eight and hadn’t stopped since. She shifted on the kitchen chair. The baby answered with a slow push under her ribs. She left her palm there.

The door to the porch stood open a crack, in a way no door in Seattle ever had. Lily didn’t lock up out here, not even at night. Nobody did. It had taken Moira the better part of her first week at the ranch to stop flinching every time a door stood open. There was nothing on the other side of it that needed keeping out.

In Seattle, she had checked the deadbolt three times before bed, even when she was alone. After Sanne moved out, she had started checking it four times.

The kettle reached its whistle. Lily poured water over the leaves in the little clay pot that had come from their grandfather’s kitchen and traveled through three of Lily’s apartments before it found this counter. She let it steep longer than the box would ever have recommended, longer than anybody in Seattle would ever have had the patience for. The tea gave off a dry, roasted-grass smell that stuck to the steam.

“You’re steeping it wrong,” Moira said without looking up. She said that same sentence most mornings.

“Six weeks of my tea, six weeks of complaints. Admit it’s fine.”

“Fine. I contain multitudes.”

“You contain a tiny person with strong opinions about oolong and no medical degree.” Lily set a mug in front of her and took the chair across the table.

Moira watched Lily sit. When the chair squeaked under her weight, Moira wanted to reach down and tighten the screw, then stopped herself. Not everything needed fixing today.

The screen door banged. Kemi had come up the porch steps with a bowl of something bright balanced against her hip and stopped in the doorway at the sight of the bare apple core on the table. The bowl carried a green, cut-fruit smell.

“Mm.” She looked from the core to Moira and back. “Somebody’s been to Mrs. Patel’s. Again.”

“I went for… air. The apples were collateral.”

Kemi crossed to the fridge, put the bowl inside, and dropped a kiss on the top of Lily’s head in passing. “Do you eat anything that isn’t wearing a peel?” she said to Moira.

“I had jook. I mean, I’m about to. Don’t look at me like that.”

“That’s a plan, not a meal.” Kemi reached past her for a clean bowl anyway and ladled a serving of rice out before Moira could argue. She set it down hard enough that a little sloshed over the rim, then pointed the spoon at her like a woman closing a hearing. The spoon knocked the bowl’s rim, two quick ticks. “Eat. And stop staring. I didn’t invent rice.”

Lily gave up trying not to laugh.

Moira picked up the spoon. Kemi had already ruled.

The jook tasted of plain salt and the soft, starchy sweetness of rice that had given up. It was the kind of food that asked nothing of her. She could appreciate that.

Kemi went back out with the screen door swinging behind her, already three sentences into a conversation with someone outside. Gospel drifted faintly through the open screen door from the lodge down the drive.

The kitchen went quiet again, the good kind of quiet Moira had taken most of her first month here to get used to. Lily and Kemi’s life on the ranch kept its own smaller rhythm, built for exactly the two of them and, lately, a third person who mostly sat and ate what was put in front of her and drank tea she claimed to hate. And the tiny one.

Moira liked being looked after. She hated needing it. Both things were true.

She wrapped both palms around the mug and looked out at the meadow, blue-gray before it turned gold. The mug’s heat bit her palms, then eased as the tea cooled. Rabbitbrush was still holding its color hard along the western fence line, small yellow flares in the landscape. The scrub oak on the south hillside had gone a deep russet. No real frost yet. It was a warm fall, though the grass had started coming up silvered at the edges some mornings before the sun burned it back to green, and she had stopped mentioning it out loud. Naming a thing asked it to hurry.

She had come here with one suitcase full of maternity clothes she hadn’t yet grown into, and a marriage that had ended so quietly it felt surreal. Two weeks, she’d promised herself on the last stretch of dirt road, long enough to get her feet under her, long enough to find a hospital and an apartment and something resembling a plan.

Six weeks later, there was this kitchen: tea steeped wrong on purpose, a sketchbook half full of drawings she erased afterward, and a sister two years younger who had somehow become the one offering her a place to land.

She had spent her working life drawing plans for other people’s gardens: setbacks, sight lines, where the sun would hit at four p.m. in December. She could tell a client exactly how their life would fit into a footprint. Her own life, apparently, was a different thing.

June had offered her the little red cabin before the trail group left, key already on a hook in Moira’s bedroom in case she wanted it. She hadn’t gone to look at it. A couple of weeks had a known end. A cabin of her own didn’t, and she hadn’t let herself think about that yet.

You’ve been miserable for three years. Go. Moira had said that to Lily once, in a different life, and driven her sister to the airport. It hadn’t occurred to her then that she’d need the same kind of shelter herself, someday.

“How’s the drawing?” Lily asked eventually, nodding at the sketchbook.

“No. It’s not going anywhere. Hasn’t all morning.”

“We’ll pretend I didn’t ask.”

Lily let it sit. That was the unspoken agreement the two of them had made: it was okay to leave a sentence unfinished in this kitchen, and nobody made you go back for it.

But she did go back.

“Jie-jie.”

“Don’t jie-jie me before this mug is empty, mei-mei. Older-sister duties start at eight.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You did in your face.”

That got a real laugh out of Lily. She finished her tea and stood to check the second batch of dough rising under its towel.

Moira carried her tea out to the porch before Lily could find another task for her to avoid. The screen door sighed shut behind her. Outside, the air had warmed enough to take the sharpness off the morning, though the boards were still cool beneath her bare feet.

The light had now gone all the way to the flat, wide gold that showed up at Sacred Peaks and stayed until early afternoon, backlighting the cottonwoods along the creek until their yellow looked lit from inside. Wild asters had opened in the sheltered pocket below the porch steps, small and purple and easy to miss unless you were sitting exactly where Moira was sitting.

Her grandfather’s denim jacket hung over the back of her chair, arms as she had left them the night before. She hadn’t put it on yet. It waited there most days until evening, until the light dropped and the temperature went with it, and putting the jacket on became the gesture that closed the day rather than the one that opened it.

The news had reached her secondhand, the way most ranch news did, that a new group was starting the riding intensive today. Three clients this round, Lily had said, small enough to keep close. Moira had nodded and gone back to her tea.

Guests came and went at Sacred Peaks the way weather did. They arrived with expensive boots, overpacked bags, and ideas about who they might become by Sunday. Most of them left sunburned, sore, and grateful.

She had stopped needing to know who was arriving and why. Mostly. That morning, though, the thought of strangers settling into the ranch had left a small, senseless knot beneath her ribs.

* * *

The porch boards had warmed up, and the air carried dry grass and pine resin. Somewhere down toward the barns, a gate clanged, and a voice she placed as Tommy’s called something she couldn’t make out. From the cabin Kim and Rae shared past the garden came a few guitar notes, there and gone, Rae playing in the morning before Kim’s shift took her down to town.

Bobbie came around the corner of the porch, brown and curly. She sniffed at the porch step, swished her tail, then settled into the strip of sun.

Moira had meant to fix the porch railing while she sat here. Her hand had gone to the loose board twice already, and both times she had let it go. A splinter on the rail caught the pad of her thumb, then let go. Getting up cost more than the railing was worth this morning. Some part of her wanted, just this once, to sit still and let something stay broken a little longer. She hadn’t let the gate hinge or any of the dozen small failing joints of this place stay broken once she found them.

It was a terrible habit, fixing everything that groaned. It made it hard to admit when something was beyond repair.

She heard the gravel first, ticking under tires, a soft, steady rattle. Then the flat hum of an engine coming up the west drive from the county road, well before the car itself rounded into view.

Through the open door behind her, Lily had started a second batch of bao for the lodge’s lunch service. Her hands paused over it.

Moira’s spine straightened.

The car came clear of the last stand of aspen, gray, unremarkable, the kind of car every ranch guest drove. It slowed at the fork, close enough that Moira could make out the shape behind the windshield.

Sunglasses. One dark, tattooed hand resting on the open window.

Something in her chest went tight, then loosened again.

It didn’t slow at the cabin. It rolled on past, toward the main house, toward the barns, toward whatever or whoever expected the guest here.

Lily looked up from the dough only long enough to track the car along the fence line, then looked back down and kept folding. After the engine faded, the stillness felt occupied, as if someone had stopped just outside earshot.

Moira’s hand found the curve of her belly. She stayed on the porch. Dust drifted back across the drive. The mug’s rim was cool and slick against her lower lip. She drank the tea, eyes returning to the bend where the drive disappeared.

One dark, tattooed hand, loose on a wheel. The dust had settled. Something else hadn’t.