The Baby After Goodbye

Cecily Crancombe grows what almost nobody else will. On the land her father left her outside Wilkes Creek, she raises native prairie seed, and she knows the hard truth of it that the town has forgotten: the toughest seed will not wake in warmth. Wild indigo, leadplant, prairie smoke, they have to lie through a whole cold, wet winter first. The freeze that looks like it should kill them is the only thing that ever lets them come up. She married a billionaire and she thought love worked the other way. She thought it grew in the warm.

Brennan Frosthall was raised to believe no one would ever want him for anything but his money, and his right hand knew exactly where to push. When Gustav handed Brennan a folder that said Cecily had married him to shield her land against his turbine expansion, that she had played him from the first day, Brennan believed the paper over his wife. He never asked her a single question. He ended it in June, in front of everyone, and he let another woman move into the space where a marriage used to be. The divorce was final eight days later.

Cecily did not know yet that she was already carrying his child. When she found out, she drove to tell him, and the man who used to be her husband looked at her and asked whose baby it was. That was the coldest hour of her life, and it was the one that set her spine. She would raise this child herself. She would keep the shop running and her name clean and her back straight through the whole hard part of the winter, and she would not beg anyone for a thing.

What neither of them understood was that the folder was a forgery, and the land Cecily was supposed to be protecting was the exact fortune Gustav had been stealing all along, funneling prairie acreage through shell companies to a rival while he steered his own boss toward the divorce that would end the marriage before anyone thought to audit him. When the fraud finally surfaces, with real evidence and a paper trail that clears her in front of the whole town, Brennan learns the worst of it in his own words: he was not fooled. He chose. He believed a stranger's lie over the woman who loved him because being unwanted was the oldest fear he had.

Being proven wrong does not give a man his family back. Brennan has to earn his way to Cecily on her terms, in patient, costly, unglamorous deeds his billions cannot buy, and he has to earn something harder than a wife. He has to earn the right to be a father to a son he once doubted. And Cecily has to decide whether a thing that broke this hard, in the cold, is exactly the kind of thing that was only ever going to wake in the spring.