Shadrach (Shadrach Acres #1)

Prolouge

"Tell me," Emily says to her husband, "tell me about the whole thing."

She adjusts herself the best she can, slowly and deliberately in her hospital bed. He reaches for the monitor strapped to her belly, keeping it still as she settles in. He watches her face. She winces as another contraction passes.

She looks back at him now, needing to know everything before their son comes into the world. The backstory of her husband that she is so in love with that it is almost embarrassing. The backstory that also belongs to their child, the mystery that floats in her womb.

"Tell me." she says gently, now ready to listen.

"Ok", he says. He lays his hand on top of hers and smiles. A smile that reaches his eyes, just like his mother.

She thinks about meeting his mother... that first meeting. She stood in a field, not far from the house her husband, Rabbit was born. She trailed around the field looking up into the sun dappled branches, her hands folded and resting in the small of her back. As they approached she held her hand out to Rabbit. He quickened his pace and joy spread across his face. The breeze stirred up dandelion puffs - tiny birds whizzed by. Moths took flight from their bark perches. Emily felt as if they breached something unknown... a bubble ... something she couldn't see, couldn't touch. A gossamer otherness.

And after that, when mother and son were together, there was always this intangible otherness.

Emily's stomach dropped upon coming face to face with the woman, not believing that she could be anyone's mother. She briefly wondered if this was some sort of twisted way to announce that this woman was also his lover ... nothing that should have been there was there.

Not a line. Nor a wrinkle. Her long chestnut hair hung to her waist, free of gray strands. She wasn't tall but she wasn't short. She had a delicate and pretty face. It was hard not to look. She couldn't have been older than Rabbit. Couldn't have been his mother. It was more than Emily could process. And just as the heat gathered around Emily's ears and neck and crept its way to her cheeks - just as she'd decided to cut her losses and turned to leave, the woman utters two words that save her world from turning into a shambling mess.

"Hey son. "

And in that moment Emily knew she was right to love him. In the next moment as their eyes meet, she knows that Rabbits mother has detected something critical about her new daughter in law. Their otherness - this mother and her son and their disarming oddness. The thing that made her love this woman's son now washed over her like a storm of airy wings, it circled and engulfed her.

That evening, Emily sat Rabbit down to tell him what his mother already knew - the thing she didn't need to be told: that she was pregnant. Rabbit, as it turned out, also had something to tell, but it would have to wait. Rabbit had to take his leave of Emily again. He would leave and come back but was never gone long. Emily had accepted it and over time had learned to anticipate when he would need to 'leave,'. When he returned - breathless, smelling like sun-warned skin and ozone, he would tell her.

Except he hadn't, and now nine months later, time had run out.

Rabbit moved his chair up to the side of his wife's bed and let down the railing, He leaned on the mattress and squeezed her hand. Now she would learn about their son.

"My mother," Rabbit began "is not a quitter ..."