At one point, Anna looked at him through the pain.
“Samuel.”
He leaned closer.
“I'm here.”
“Whatever happens—”
“Don't.”
She stared at him.
He pressed her hand to his lips.
“You don't have to tell me anything. I'm here.”
She closed her eyes.
When the baby finally cried, the sound seemed to fill the entire house.
Samuel stopped breathing.
The midwife smiled.
“A healthy little girl.”
Anna began to cry.
Samuel stood motionless, unable to comprehend the small bundle in the woman's arms.
Then the midwife placed the baby against Anna's chest.
The child had a tiny face, a shock of dark hair, and fingers that opened and closed as though she were trying to grasp the air.
Anna looked up at her husband.
“Come here.”
Samuel approached the bed.
The midwife showed him how to support the baby's head and place one arm beneath her body.
He took the child with a care that seemed almost painful.
She weighed so little.
Her warmth surprised him.
Her breath brushed against his wrist.
Samuel looked down at her and felt fourteen years of grief rise inside him, not as bitterness this time, but as a sorrow that could finally be acknowledged without being allowed to control him.
He had wanted this moment for so long.
He had believed it was impossible.
Now a daughter lay in his arms, and he could scarcely find the words to greet her.
Anna watched him.
“Samuel?”
He looked at his wife.
Then he looked at the child.
“What should we call her?”
Anna smiled faintly.
“I thought perhaps Elizabeth. After your mother.”
Samuel's eyes filled.
“Elizabeth.”
He bent his head toward the baby.
“Welcome home, little one.”
The child stirred.
He laughed softly, a sound Anna had never heard from him before.
It was not the restrained laugh he used when a ranch hand told a joke. It was not the brief, careful amusement of a man who had learned to guard his happiness.
It was a full, unguarded laugh.
And when he looked up at Anna, she saw that the man who had once feared he had nothing to offer a family had finally understood what he had been carrying all along.
He had a home.
He had a wife.
And he had a daughter.
The question of Elizabeth's parentage remained important, but it no longer possessed the power to destroy Samuel.
The medical findings established that his old diagnosis had been unsupported. Dr. Mercer explained that the injury had not made fatherhood impossible, and the available evidence was consistent with Samuel being Elizabeth's biological father.