“The baby, I guess.”

“Think about it,” he said. “If you stay here when you have the baby then you’ll have us to help out.”

“I don’t want to do that to you,” she said. “You already raised kids.”

“I did,” he said. “And to be clear I am not offering to raise your kid. But, Iris will be here. Iris loves babies.”

“I don’t know that your sister would appreciate you deciding that she can babysit.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “She’ll live.”

“Very sensitive of you.”

“I never said I was sensitive.” They both turned to face their respective frying pans, and their shoulders brushed together.

“I just... The whole point of this is... I don’t want to be like her. She’s...she’s just still here and she hasn’t changed and it made me worried maybe I haven’t done enough to move on from everything we went through, either.”

“If it’s just to change things, then you can do that in a much less permanent way than having a baby, you know? Get a tattoo, Sammy.”

“Tattoos are permanent, Ryder. Or did you not know that was the point of them?”

“All right, but you don’t have to feed a tattoo. Or change its diaper.”

“It’s more than that,” she said. “You have all this family that loves you. I don’t. I never did. I’m an only child from a couple of miserable people and you know that. You’re the only one who really knows. I want to fill my life with something...sweeter. Better. I want to make a family that I love that loves me back.”

“We’re your family,” he said, his voice rough.

“I know,” she said, shaking the pan slightly and letting the bacon pop and sizzle.

“But it’s not enough for you?”

She didn’t know how to answer that. Ryder and Hope Springs Ranch had been enough for her, more than enough for so many years. They had been the fulfillment of dreams that she hadn’t even been brave enough to have when she was a little girl. Dreams that had been nothing but whispers and echoes inside her as she had listened to the violence that tore through her house on a nightly basis.

But it wasn’t about enough. It was about shifting and changing and growing.

It was about...this restless empty ache inside her that never seemed quite filled or solved no matter how much she wished that it were.

It was about the desire to prove she could be better than her mother. That her anger wasn’t misplaced. That it wasn’t actually so hard to simply love your own child.

“Why a baby?” he asked.

It was what they’d been talking about this whole time. But the way he asked now, with his voice husky and serious, his shoulders set rigid even as he flipped the eggs in the pan. She couldn’t deny him an answer. And that meant looking deeper inside herself than she would like. But she owed him that much. And for Ryder she would suffer a little bit.