If you stay in this broken wagon, girl, the night frost will claim you and that unborn child before moonrise.
The November blizzard struck with a vengeance. The wind howled like a banshee, tearing through the mountain pines around Leo’s remote cabin. Snow piled against the windows, quickly reaching six feet, swallowing the world in a blinding whiteout.
Inside the small cabin, the air was hot and humid, heavy with the smell of woodsmoke and exertion. I lay on Leo’s narrow bunk, gripped by waves of agonizing pain. The early labor had started abruptly, hours after the storm hit.
Leo, his face etched with worry, paced the cabin floor. He kept throwing more logs onto the fire, as if to outrun the cold that pressed against the walls.
“Hettie,” I gasped, clutching Leo’s hand as another contraction seized me. “Did she make it?”
He shook his head, his gaze fixed on the snow-choked trail outside. “She should have been here by now. This storm… it’s too thick.”
Just as despair began to settle in, a faint banging resonated from the cabin door, barely audible over the wind. Leo leaped to it, wrestling with the snowdrifts that pressed against it.
Midwife Hettie O’Rourke stumbled in, a human snowdrift herself, her face red and chapped from the biting cold. Her heavy fur coat was stiff with ice.
“Damn this weather!” she grunted, peeling off her frozen gloves. “Nearly lost my way twice. But a baby waits for no storm.”
The night that followed was a blur of excruciating pain and Hettie’s calm, steady commands. Leo stayed by my side, his presence a silent anchor against the storm both inside and outside the cabin. The sounds of the blizzard were a constant, roaring backdrop to my own cries.
As the first faint streaks of dawn bruised the eastern sky, cutting through the whiteout, a new sound filled the cabin. A tiny, indignant wail.
Hettie held up a squalling bundle. “It’s a girl, Martha! A fighter, just like her mother.”
Tears streamed down my face as I reached out for my daughter. Her tiny hand curled around my finger, a fierce, primal grip. I named her Clara, for the bright, clear light she brought into this world.
The cabin air filled with a fragile, exhausted peace.
But the peace was short-lived. A sudden, insistent pounding hammered at the cabin door, not the tentative knock of a friend, but the authoritative thud of heavy boots. The sound was too urgent, too demanding for such a remote mountain trail.
Leo grabbed his rifle. He peered through a crack in the door, his jaw tightening.
Silas Gable stood on my doorstep, his face grim, two armed deputies flanking him, their rifles glinting in the faint, snowy light. He held a document in his gloved hand.
“Martha Gable,” Silas’s voice boomed through the thin wood of the door, muffled by the blizzard. “By order of the territorial court, I’m here to take custody of this infant. You are deemed an unfit mother, suffering from severe mental instability.”
My blood ran cold. He had tracked me. He had used Albright to get a court order. Even in this isolated cabin, even in the middle of a blizzard, he would not leave us alone.
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