dark eyes for half a second, and whispered, ‘Mama?’
‘I’m here,’ Maren said.
Elowen slept again.
Maren stood in the soft green room, listening to the small, steady breathing of the child Nathan had called impossible, then inconvenient, then lost.
But Elowen had never been lost.
She had been carried through silence, born into thunder, raised in truth, and loved without condition.
And Maren, who had once held a pregnancy test like evidence from a crime, now held her life like proof of something stronger.
Some men leave before the miracle arrives.
Some women learn that the miracle was never meant to make him stay.
