disappear, only far enough to break the wind. She used her elbows and right knee. Her left leg dragged behind her. The road seemed to stretch with every inch.
Halfway to the trees, she stopped and vomited into the snow.
Fear did that. Cold did that. Pregnancy did that. Betrayal did that.
When she could breathe again, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and forced herself onward.
The pines were darker beneath their branches. Snow still fell there, but less directly. Nora wedged herself against a trunk and curled around her stomach, trying to make her body a wall between the child and the storm.
“Listen to me,” she whispered to the baby. “Your father is a coward. Your grandmother is worse. But you have an uncle who puts trackers in antiques, and you have me.”
Her teeth chattered so hard the words broke.
“You have me.”
Time became unreliable.
She saw the gala again in fragments. Margot’s hand on her elbow, steering her away from a journalist who asked about the pregnancy. Julian’s smile tightening when Nora said she planned to hire her own attorney before signing anything. The family doctor telling her she seemed “overstimulated” and offering a mild sedative she did not take.
She remembered the office after dinner.
The fire behind Julian. The papers on the desk. Margot standing by the window.
“It is a formality,” Julian had said.
Nora had read enough to know it was not. The agreement gave Julian and Margot temporary decision-making power over the child in the event Nora was judged medically unstable. A private physician chosen by the Vale family could make that recommendation.
“This says you can take my baby,” Nora had said.
Margot sighed. “What dramatic wording.”
“I’m not signing.”
Julian’s eyes changed then. Only for a second. The mask slipped, and she saw what lived underneath: entitlement, offended and absolute.
“You think walking into this family made you equal to it?” he asked.
Nora backed toward the door. “I think I’m leaving.”
He had followed calmly. He was always calm when he frightened her most.
In the present, under the pine tree, Nora jerked awake. She did not remember falling asleep.
That terrified her.
Sleep was not rest in that cold. It was surrender.
She slapped her own cheek. The sting felt distant. The baby had gone still.
Panic opened inside her.
“No. No, move for me.” She pressed her hands over her stomach. “Please, sweetheart. Move.”
Nothing.
Nora began to sing.
It was not a song fit for a Vale nursery. It was the old tune her mother hummed in their apartment when the pipes clanged and the radiators failed, a song without proper words, made mostly of breath and stubbornness. Nora sang it into the collar of her torn dress, into the snow, into the dark.
After several terrible seconds, the baby shifted.
Small. Slow. There.
Nora cried then, silently, because tears on her cheeks were another kind of cold.
A beam of light swept across the road.
At first she thought she had imagined it. Then it came again, brighter, moving between the trees.
A dog barked.
A voice shouted, “Signal is below the bend!”
Nora tried to answer. Only a rasp came out.
The light swung away.
No.
She
