She pressed her lips together, but managed a shrug. “Likely not. It wasn’t that, exactly. But I’d have been lessened. Forever. I would always be the one who…who had been so stupid. And if I got any smaller in their eyes, I was afraid I’d just disappear. I don’t suppose this makes any sense to you.”

“Well,” he said slowly. “No. Or maybe yes, if I broaden the notion from just having babies to living altogether. I am put in mind of a certain not-so-young patroller who once moved the world to get back on patrol, for all that there were plenty of one-handed tasks needing doing back in the camps. His motives weren’t too sensible at the time, either.”

“Hm.” She eyed him sideways. “I figured I could learn to deal with a baby, if I had to. It was dealing with Stupid Sunny and my family that seemed impossible.”

In the exact same distant tone that he’d inquired about Sunny and rape, he asked, “Was your family, um…cruel to you?”

She stared a moment in some bewilderment, trying to figure out what he was picturing. Beatings with whips? Being locked up on nothing but bread and water? The fancy seemed as slanderous of her poor overworked parents and dear Aunt Nattie as what Sunny had threatened to say of her. She sat up in mortified indignation. “No!” After a reflective moment she revised this to, “Well, my brothers can be a plague. When they notice me at all, that is.” Justice served, but it brought her back to the depressing notion that it was all something wrong with her. Well, maybe it was.

“Brothers can be that,” he conceded. He added cautiously, “So could you go home now? There no longer being a”—his gesture finished, baby, but his mouth managed—“an obstacle.”

“I suppose,” she said dully.

His brows drew down. “Wait. Did you leave some word, or did you just vanish?”

“Vanished, more or less. I mean, I didn’t write anything. But I would think they could see I’d taken some things. If they looked closely.”

“Won’t your family be frantic? They could think you were hurt. Or dead. Or taken by bandits. Or who knows what—drowned, caught in a snare. Won’t Stu—Sunny confess and turn out to help search?”

Fawn’s nose wrinkled in doubt. “It’s not what I’d pictured.” Not of Sunny, anyway. Now relieved of the driving panic of her pregnancy, she thought anew of the baffling scene she’d likely left behind her at West Blue, and gulped guilt.

“They have to be looking for you, Spark. I sure would be, if I were your”—He bit off the last word, whatever it was, abruptly. Chewed and swallowed it, too, as if uncertain of the taste.