She takes my hand and puts it back on her belly. She tries twice to say something. Then she looks down to my hand on her stomach and her hand holding it there. “Your baby’s in there,” she says.

She says it like an apology, so it takes a second for her words to be clear in my mind. And then, less than a second for the shock to turn to joy. “My child?” I say. “You’re carrying my child?”

I can barely kiss her for smiling. I lay her back in the grass and rub my lips across her belly. Softly. So softly. My little one is growing in there. I’m going to be a father. My beautiful Sarah is going to have my child. I lay my head beside her belly.

“Hello, in there,” I whisper. “I’m your da.”

“You ain’t mad?”

I pick my head up and kiss her from her belly, up her chest, to her lips, a smile stretching my mouth so wide I feel it in my cheeks.

“I’m so happy,” I say. “You’re giving me a child. We’re going to be a family.” I can’t stop touching her. Mother of my child. I desire her more than ever. Everything I feel is deeper and stronger. Before she had my heart. Now she is my heart.

When I lay with her, I cannot get close enough or deep enough and when she shouts out my name I’m overwhelmed, crying like a child as I shudder my release.

A breeze licks at the sweat on my back, cooling me as the sun bakes my skin. Somewhere in the wildflower field a bullfrog croaks. I trail my fingers up and down her body and end by circling her belly.

“I thought you’d be upset.”

“Never,” I say. “I’m counting on you giving me lots more little ones. I want six, or seven. Maybe eight.” I prop myself up on my elbow to look into her face. “Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We’ll have plenty of each by the time we’re done.”

I kiss her then, but she doesn’t respond. Instead, she looks away and curls on to her side, pulling her knees up. It comes to me, only now, that she might not be happy about this at all.

“Sarah? Don’t you want to have my child?”

She looks up into my face hovering over hers. I can see the distress in her features and I’m sorry I’ve asked the question because now I don’t want to hear the answer.

“I’m scared,” she says.

I kiss her forehead and take her hands. “There never was a mother who wasn’t scared for her child,” I say.

Tears that have formed in her eyes leak out and into her hairline. I coax her back around to me with strokes and caresses, but it doesn’t calm her. She clings to me and cries.

I don’t understand the depth of her fear, until she says, “I don’t want him to have our baby.”