Page 43

Emily’s heart thundered in her chest.

“Dorothy?” She hurried back up the ladder, calling for the child over and over. “Dorothy! Dorothy! Where are you?”

Panic stole all sense of logic as she rushed around the house, opening cupboard doors and peering beneath tables and beds, and all the time the wind roared at the windows.

She ran back outside, calling the child’s name, fear snatching her words as she ran to the barn. It was the only place she could be.

“Dorothy, are you in here? It’s Auntie Em.”

A bark came from the back of the barn, behind the tractor.

“Toto! Oh, Toto. There you are? Where’s Dorothy? Where is she?”

The dog yapped and yapped as Emily ran toward him and there, huddled in the corner, her knees to her chest, her arms over her head, was Dorothy.

“Oh, thank goodness. There you are.” Emily rushed to her. “It’s okay. I’m here now. Are you hurt?”

Dorothy slowly lifted her head. The look of fear and vulnerability in the child’s face turned Emily’s heart inside out.

“You left me, Auntie Em. You left me.”

The words cut through Emily like a hundred knives.

“I’m so sorry, Dorothy dear. I hated to leave you, but I had to go to the hospital with Uncle Henry and…

” Her words tailed off. It didn’t matter.

However she tried to justify it, there was nothing she could say or do to make the child understand.

She had left her all alone, in the middle of the night, in a storm.

There was no explanation that would ever make that all right.

She reached out a tentative hand and placed it on Dorothy’s.

“I promise I will never leave you again.”

And she meant it. It had frightened her to be away from Dorothy, just as much as it had frightened Dorothy to be left alone.

The child looked up at Emily, her eyes full of fear. “Promise?”

Emily squeezed Dorothy’s hands. “I promise, with all my heart. Now, come along. Let’s hurry to the cellar.”

“Can’t we stay here, Auntie Em? Please! I don’t want to go into the cellar. Please!”

Emily faltered a moment. The child was so terrified, and the storm was abating a little. It seemed to have switched direction again at the last minute.

She pulled Dorothy into her lap and wrapped her arms tight around her. “We’ll stay right here, together. You’re safe now.”

Emily’s dress was sodden from the hail, her shoes covered in dust and dirt, her face burned with the sting of the wind, but Dorothy was safe, and that was all that mattered.

Toto curled up at their feet as they clung to each other while the storm rattled the barn roof.

They played counting games and guessing games to pass the time.

Emily sang an Irish ballad her mother used to sing when the wind whipped across the Atlantic and rattled the eaves of their Connemara cottage.

“Why didn’t you go to the cellar?” Emily asked eventually when Dorothy had calmed down a little.

“I tried to, but Toto was afraid. He wouldn’t go down. Would you, Toto?” The dog licked Dorothy’s hand. “He got a fright and ran outside.”

Emily was so afraid of what could have happened if Toto had run off further, if the storm had been worse, if something had fallen and hit Dorothy on the head.

And while she was so grateful that Dorothy was safe, she was still desperately worried about Henry as images from the night flashed across her mind and the echo of his agonized cries tormented her.

On the prairie, the margins between life and death were dangerously thin.

Eventually, the storm passed and everything fell silent apart from the drumming in Emily’s heart as she thought about Henry in the hospital and prayed she’d gotten him there in time.

—

Emily watched the first lavender light of the new day settle over the prairie. She hadn’t slept a wink. In her arms, Dorothy slept soundly.

She stood up carefully so as not to wake the child and carried her back to the house, quietly calling for Toto to follow.

Outside, the air was so still it was hard to believe such wild winds had roared just a few hours earlier, the only sound now the familiar hum of the ’hoppers.

The prairie was such a riddle. Furious one moment, peaceful the next, lurching from one mood to another like a petulant child.

Which was why she didn’t fully trust this peaceful truce.

She recalled a conversation with Adelaide. “You adjust to the silence, and the thinking. Strange, isn’t it, how somewhere so vast can make a person feel so small. But you do get used to it. Learn to adapt.”

Had she gotten used to it? Really? As it had so often since she’d come here, Emily felt the prairie, once again, asking questions of her.

Was she brave enough to stay when it turned against her?

Could she do any of this without Henry—manage the farm alone if anything happened to him, like Ingrid after Eric’s death?

And the hardest question of all: What is it you really want, Emily?

As she looked at the sleeping child in her arms, she remembered the featherlight feel of Dorothy as a newborn, the almond-sweet scent of her, the way the infant had looked at her with such innocence and love, the ache of letting go.

What she’d felt that day, and so many times since, had frightened her, but no more.

Finally, she understood that what she’d felt was nothing dark or sinister.

What she’d felt was love. A great and powerful love.

It settled now in the map of her heart as the answer to the hardest question came to her. What she wanted wasn’t important. It was what she needed that mattered, and she had everything, right here. There was no feeling—no place—like it.

Inside the house, Emily laid Dorothy on her bed and pulled up the bedspread she’d made with her own hands through the long winter nights in her first years on the prairie. As she bent down to kiss Dorothy’s cheek, the child’s hand reached for hers.

Emily had promised she would never leave her again, and she meant it. No matter how hard things might become, she couldn’t bear to send Dorothy away, not to Nell, not to anyone. Wherever Dorothy went, she went, too. They were connected now. Two ends of an hourglass, forever turning together.

She lay down beside Dorothy and closed her eyes.

She was just drifting off to sleep when she heard it. Distant at first, and then louder.

The pitch and whine of an engine.

Getting closer.

She stood up and walked to the door, opened it a crack, and then wider as the roar of an engine filled the air and dust blew in whirlwinds on the porch.

Adelaide!

Adelaide had returned.