She Sighed, “No One Wants A Bride With Three Kids” The Cowboy Smiled, “I Always Wanted A Big Family”

Chapter 2

Doc Ellsworth arrived before dawn, which was to say he arrived in the cold blue hour when the stars were going out one by one and the roosters had not yet remembered themselves. Willa heard the wagon and then the boots, and then Gideon’s voice in the yard, low and urgent but not panicked, and she was at the door before the doctor had crossed the threshold, her hands still twisted in the cloth, her hair coming down out of its pins.

The doctor was a spare, gray man with spectacles and the unhurried calm of a person who had seen too many fevers to be frightened of one more. He set his bag on the kitchen table, climbed the stairs, and bent over Lily for a long time, his cool fingers on her throat and her wrists, his ear at her chest, the lamplight carving shadows into his face. Willa stood in the doorway and watched his expression the way a condemned woman watches the jury file back in.