The child chose the first week of blossom, as if she had been listening through the wall of the world to her parents' arguments and had decided to settle the question of timing herself. Willa labored through a night of wind, with Grandmother Saba in attendance and half the valley's women moving through the ranch house on soft feet, bringing broth and linen. Jonas was banished to the porch twice and readmitted twice. He held Willa's hand through the worst of it and said nothing worth remembering, which she later told him was exactly the right speech.
Toward dawn the wind dropped, and in the sudden quiet the child's first cry came thin and furious and entirely satisfactory, and Saba laid a daughter on Willa's chest with the air of a woman presenting the valley with its own future and expecting it to behave accordingly. She was small and dark-haired and outraged, with her mother's pale blue eyes opening onto a world she appeared to find insufficiently explained. Jonas put one finger into the tiny fist and felt it close with a grip that Saba pronounced prophetic and Willa pronounced, drowsily, pure Hale stubbornness arriving by the maternal line. They named her Clara, for the mother Willa had lost in the year of the fever, Clara Hale, who had crossed every line her own world drew and loved where she chose. The name went into both languages easily, as if it had been waiting in each of them for a bearer.
Nahlin arrived by noon, having ridden through the tail of the windstorm at an age when his council begged him to let younger men carry news both ways. He held his granddaughter with the terrible gentleness of a large man who has buried too many small relations, and he spoke to her in the old tongue for a long while, telling her, Willa translated later, about the valley, and the water, and the sealed mountain, and the tree she would climb before she was five if her mother's blood meant anything. Then the chief of the valley, who had once offered a cowboy the choice of marriage or death, looked up at Jonas with something perilously close to mischief in his old eyes and observed that the child had her grandfather Amos's ears. He said he would take the chief's word for it, as he had learned to take the chief's word on all matters concerning his family, and Nahlin laughed aloud, which startled the baby not at all.
In the days that followed, the valley and the settlements came by twos and threes to look at Clara Hale, bringing preserves, quilts, carved toys, and opinions about whose chin she had inherited, and Tomaso entered every visitor in the guest book in his new careful hand, as if the book were a treaty. Renner sent a silver cup engraved with her name and a letter so formal and so tender that Willa read it three times. The orchard stood in full blossom below the house, white row on white row, and the bees worked it in a hum that carried through open windows, and the child slept through all of it with the profound indifference of the very young.
It was on the porch, on one of those first evenings, that Willa, with Clara asleep against her shoulder, asked Jonas whether he remembered what her father had said to him on the day he rode into the valley. Marry, or die. Jonas said a man does not forget the more courteous of his wedding invitations. She asked if he had ever regretted that no third option had been offered. Jonas considered the question with the seriousness it deserved, looking out over his father's restored land, the orchard, the road to the valley, the whole improbable architecture of a life he had not planned and would not trade. Then he told her the joke he had been saving for three years. There had always been a third option, he said. Stay because he wanted to. He had simply needed the ultimatum removed so that everyone, himself included, could be certain which of the three he had picked. Willa laughed quietly, so as not to wake the baby, and leaned her scarred cheek against his shoulder, and said the valley had known that too, since breakfast, more or less.
Years would add their chapters, as years do. But the shape of the thing was set, the way a river's shape is set, and everything after would run in the channel those hard years had cut. On the last evening of that first week, Jonas stood alone a moment under the great cottonwood where he had been married twice, once by necessity and once by love. The wind moved through its leaves above him, and there was no veil anywhere in the valley that night, only Willa coming down the path toward him unveiled in the dusk, her mother's locket bright at her throat, their daughter in her arms, a woman the world had taught for nine years that being seen was dangerous, walking now in open country, seen, and unafraid.
The valley kept them all.
The End