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For a while, she was too afraid to move, too afraid to open her eyes, too afraid to see what had happened. She couldn’t stop shaking.

Eventually, she opened her eyes and turned to Henry.

His face was covered in dirt and full of fear as he placed his hands on her cheeks. “We’re still here, Em. Whatever’s happened, we are still here.”

“What time is it?” She wasn’t sure why she asked. She needed something simple to root herself back to reality.

Henry checked his watch. “Nearly ten past.”

They’d gone to the shelter on the hour. Two a.m. It had lasted less than ten minutes.

They stayed where they were. Emily held tight to Henry, afraid to let go, afraid to face what was waiting for them above.

Henry stood up first. He reached for Emily’s hand and helped her up.

Her teeth chattered. Her whole body convulsed violently as she slowly climbed the ladder.

At first, she couldn’t orient herself, couldn’t find a single thing she recognized as she clambered out of the hatch and saw a scene of utter devastation, lit by the moon.

Then she saw it.

The water pump.

The only solid undamaged thing left standing.

She crawled on her hands and knees toward it and clung to the handle like a life raft as she took in the scene around her. Their beautiful home, their crops, their dreams lay scattered all around her, like toys thrown in temper by a petulant child.

Emily had felt pain and loss in her life, many times over. But this was different. This was visceral and shocking and completely overwhelming. She felt as torn apart as their beloved home. She was the scattered broken ruins strewn across the prairie.

It was gone.

Everything.

She let out such a heartrending wail that she frightened herself. She had never heard a sound so utterly devastating.

She turned then and vomited onto the ground, retching over and over as the last of herself was purged to join the scraps and shattered fragments of what remained.

Henry placed his arms under hers, supporting her as he hauled her to her feet.

“Stand up, Emily. You have to stand up.”

She gripped his hands. “It’s gone, Henry. All of it. Everything.”

“Don’t you dare give up, Emily Gale. Remember who you are. Who we are.”

She looked at him and saw such fear in his eyes. She didn’t know who they were anymore. Without their home, their farm, what was there? When it was all taken away, what was left?

Just as Annie had predicted, it had all been a terrible mistake. “But is it enough, Em? Really? Is it everything you wanted it to be?”

She felt like a lost little girl who had wandered far away from her home and her family and couldn’t find her way back to them.

She broke down in tears, and through her raw wild anguish, there was only one thing she wanted.

“I want my mother, Henry,” she sobbed, clinging to his shirt. “I miss her. I miss her so much.”

—

They spent the night in the motorcar, which had miraculously survived the tornado, directionless passengers with nowhere to go.

They didn’t talk much.

Neither of them slept.

At first light, they wandered around in a daze, recovering what they could.

Like a child picking up dropped candy, Emily stooped to gather anything she could find, no matter how small: a single spoon, a chipped milk jug, her rolling pin, pillows and cushions covered in dirt, several books with their covers torn and spines broken, one tattered red shoe, then the other some distance away, the straps snapped and the buckles missing.

The larder had remained relatively intact, her carefully preserved jars miraculously unspoiled, the wildflowers on the wallpaper still in full bloom.

Three steps led to an invisible porch. The swing seat lay on its side in three pieces.

She found a pair of Henry’s dungarees wrapped around a clump of Russian thistle, and his hat impaled on the end of a broken fencepost. All that remained of the scarecrows were torn shreds of Henry’s old clothes, their straw stuffing blown clean out of them.

She felt just as lifeless and empty, flapping aimlessly in the breeze.

Hours passed.

The horses returned. The surviving sow snuffled tirelessly through a bank of earth. Three chickens scratched in the dirt.

By midmorning, the blue skies and golden sun seemed out of place among the scene of violent destruction below.

Hank and Laurie Miller arrived after hearing that a tornado had touched down a few miles south of Liberal.

Hank brought hammers and nails, Laurie brought corn cakes and coffee.

It was the saddest breakfast Emily had ever eaten.

Henry tried to lighten the mood. “I would say pull up a chair, but our chairs are probably in Oklahoma by now.”

Laurie burst into tears.

Emily comforted her. She was too exhausted to cry anymore.

The four of them continued their despondent search throughout the morning, rounding up broken bits of Emily and Henry’s life as if they were a team of old ranchers driving the herd.

Emily found a window frame, the glass shattered, the blue and white gingham curtains she’d made still attached to the broken pole.

Laurie found an upturned dresser drawer, the photograph of Dorothy still inside it.

Emily didn’t have the energy to be embarrassed when Hank found items of her underwear.

She already felt as broken and exposed as the remaining timbers of her home.

Talk of Gale Farm being upended by the tornado spread like a prairie fire across town.

More folk came to offer help in any way they could: a tractor to move the dirt, a pie, a bottle of hooch, more coffee, another pie.

As Emily looked around their busy little patch of torn-up land, her heart broke to see such gentle kindness after such violent destruction.

These were good people. The best people. She could never thank them enough.

“We’ve seen this before,” Laurie said. “And, no doubt, we’ll see it plenty again. We help one another. That’s what prairie folk do. We pray it doesn’t happen, but we come through for one another when it does.”

Sometime in the afternoon, Emily found her prairie journal, safe in the drawer of her nightstand.

It had been carried over what was left of the barn and thrown at the base of the windmill, which was, miraculously, still standing.

The journal was more valuable to her than she’d realized, her hopes and dreams captured among the pages: precious memories now of what they’d built, and lost.

Henry placed his arm around her shoulder as she turned through the dirt-streaked pages that she had filled with her thoughts and hopes, and the empty pages that remained.

“See, so many more pages to fill,” he said. “So much more of our story to tell.”

She laid her head on his shoulder. “But I loved the story I was writing, Henry. I didn’t want it to end.”

He pulled her to her feet and brushed dirt from her cheek.

“End? What is this talk of endings?” He offered a hopeful smile through his despair.

“We’re only just beginning, you and me. We knew this wouldn’t be easy, or always go our way.

We’ve had a good run, Em—a great run, so far.

This is our test, and we’re alive and we’ll survive it.

It’s done now, the thing you feared the most. It’s over. ”

They salvaged what they could find, and what wasn’t broken beyond repair, or could be put to other use. In one final miracle, just before dusk, Emily found her father’s fiddle, propped against a fence post, as if he’d left it for her there as a gift.

As they rode back into Liberal to stay with the Millers for a while, Emily’s hand strayed to her coat pocket. The lump of Connemara marble was still there. After all these years, through all this time and upheaval, this little piece of Ireland was still with her.

It was that, in the end, that broke her.

She should have planted her dreams elsewhere.

—

Folk rallied around, everyone lending what bit of something they could spare: timber and nails, pots and pans, fabric and linen and clothes.

The men worked every day and late into the night, hauling timber, helping Henry build a temporary shelter that would see them through until they could build a permanent home again.

Ingrid gave Emily the black mourning dress she’d worn when she’d buried Eric. Laurie gave her an old black coat.

“It has seen better days,” she said. “But the lining will make a decent shirt for Henry. And there’s a pair of old boots here that Hank will never miss.”

Emily was grateful for everyone’s generosity, but the good intentions only seemed to emphasize their helplessness.

“This is what life has come to,” she whispered as they lay stiff and brittle as rusted old nails in a made-up bed in the Millers’ living room. “Funeral dresses, and old coat linings for shirts, and hand-me-down boots.”

“For now, Em. Not forever.” Henry reached for her hand in the dark. “We won’t give up. We don’t quit, remember.”

She remembered. She also remembered what he’d said at one of Annie and John’s dinner parties. “Nobody farms for an easy life. It’s an addiction. A love affair…a commitment, like a marriage…It’s a life that chooses the person, rather than the other way around.”

She wondered why the prairie had chosen her, wondered if it had chosen her, or if she was just an accessory to Henry’s plans.

She wasn’t sure anymore. Was this the life she really wanted, the thrilling adventure she’d imagined when she’d agreed to marry Henry and build a life with him in this desolate wilderness?

She didn’t know what to do with her despair.

She silently blamed Henry for building their home in the wrong place, for not making it strong enough, for telling her everything would work out when it hadn’t.

And she blamed Annie for selfishly asking her to stay behind while Henry went ahead without her.

Perhaps the prairie had never recognized her, this stranger who’d arrived as an afterthought.

Like the great piles of moldering grain stored beside the elevators, she was surplus to requirements.

But then she remembered that she was needed, that this wasn’t just about her and Henry anymore. In all the chaos and fear, she’d forgotten that there was someone else to consider now.

“There’s something I need to tell you, Henry.”

He turned to look at her. His eyes were glazed and empty. “Can it wait? I’m exhausted, Em.”

“I’m pregnant.”

The words were blunt and raw. A stated fact rather than the emotionally charged announcement she’d imagined. It was the worst possible time for it to have happened, the worst possible way to tell him. But it was the only time, and the only way.

She took a deep breath and repeated the words, testing them out, trying them on, feeling the shape and weight of them.

“I’m pregnant.”