I want to say I'm not sure who enjoyed that pick-up truck ride into Little Falls less, me or Blaze, but I'm pretty sure it was Blaze, despite my being so tense I nearly jumped out of my skin every time we hit a bump.

Something about that jolting motion just brought on her contractions – and by that point we were all sure they were real contractions, not some kind of Braxton-Hicks or false labor situation. DeeDee slowed right down every time we approached a pothole or an area of very uneven ground, but Blaze's anguished cries were getting worse, and everyone was conscious of the fact that we needed to get to the medical center as soon as possible. I called ahead as we drove, and as my wife-to-be (how glad it made me to think of her that way) alternated between anguished writhing and periods of calm beside me.

"Ah, OK, Blaze Wilson? I'm going to need to call Dr. Sunderland in – it's her day off today. Are you sure your wife is in labor? Let me get a midwife, one minute."

I didn't even have time to respond. A minute later another voice came on and asked to speak to Blaze. When I said that probably wasn't going to be possible she told me to just hold the phone near Blaze's mouth, that she just needed to listen to her breathing. I followed the midwife's instructions just as another contraction hit and Blaze began to pant, staring up at me with a wild, frightened look in her eyes. I pressed the phone back to my own ear. "Well?"

"Uh, yeah. You need to bring her in right now, Mr. Wilson."

I ignored her calling me by the wrong name and suppressed the urge to yell "NO SHIT!" down the phone – it wasn't the midwife's fault I was losing my mind. "We're on our way already," I said. "We should be there in ten minutes."

"OK, the nurse is calling Dr. Sunderland now and we'll be ready when you arrive. See you soon!"

The midwife sounded far too casual for my liking, but Blaze was clutching my hand so tightly by that point I expected to lose a few fingers to blood loss, so there was no time to complain about the medical staff's apparent calm in the face of what, to me, seemed to be an earth-shattering crisis.

Once we hit paved roads again DeeDee gunned it, gripping the steering wheel until her own knuckles turned as white as mine, and only slowing down once to roll down the window and scream at Sheriff Randall, who was parked off the main road nabbing speeding tourists coming into town, that Blaze was in labor. Within seconds, the Sheriff had overtaken us, lights on and siren blaring as he led us through Little Falls to the medical clinic. We came to a screeching halt outside the front door and the Sheriff was already out of his cruiser, yelling at a couple of bemused looking orderlies in scrubs to "Get a doctor, damnit, RIGHT NOW!"

I felt a moment of uncertainty standing outside as chaos seemed to bloom around me, centered on Blaze – who was panicking and clinging to my arm, unable to stand up during her contractions. Sheriff Randall was yelling. DeeDee was yelling. Blaze was yelling. And soon, a nurse was yelling at all of us to calm down. She helped Blaze into a wheelchair and we rushed in through the sliding glass doors. It was at that moment, just inside the front door, that I looked down at the exact same moment Blaze looked up at me. Our eyes met and something clicked inside my head. I couldn't lose it. Not then. It simply wasn't an option. Blaze needed me. I've never seen that kind of helplessness in the eyes of another human being until that day – not even when I pulled her out of Parson's Creek. I squeezed her shoulder.

"We're here now, babe. We're here. You're safe."

Although my reassurances of safety didn't seem to cut down on the pain of her contractions, I saw the gratefulness in her expression. She told me later that that was the moment she allowed herself to really let go, to surrender her body the mysterious process that had taken over.

* * *

Dorothy Blaze McMurtry was born at ten minutes past nine in the evening. She weighed eight pounds exactly and even I had to admit, along with the gushing nurses and friends who arrived to congratulate us and meet the new arrival, that she looked just like her daddy.

About an hour after she was born, as Blaze and I sat alone with her, running our fingers gently over her impossibly soft skin and her gorgeous little button nose, I looked at my wife to be and announced I was done for.

She smiled, her eyes half closed with fatigue and the drunken kind of love we were both practically drowning in. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I'm done. That's it. Jack McMurtry is done. Can't you feel it? Nothing is ever going to matter as much as this – as much as you and," I looked down at our sleeping baby, "her. Everything is different now, Blaze."

I worried at first that I wouldn't know how to relate to a newborn baby, that I wouldn't know what to do. In the end, I could barely let go of her long enough to let her mother feed her. She was a delight, endlessly fascinating, and we found ourselves lying for hours on the big bed in the master bedroom with Dorothy between us, watching as the ghosts of McMurtrys and Wilsons past flitted across her tiny features, arguing over who she was going to look like when she got older.

There was a rightness to her satisfying weight in my arms, even in the middle of the night when she would wake at three in morning and cry until dawn broke and I had to hand her off to her mother so I could go take care of the livestock.

It wasn't easy. It was the least-easy thing I have ever done. But it was always worth it. There was never a moment when it even came close to not being worth it, and I knew I would have gone through ten times the sleepless nights – a hundred times, a thousand times – if it meant my girls kept smiling.

Within about six weeks we slipped into an approximation of a routine. In the evenings, just after feeding the Moileds and the horses, I would walk back up to the house. The leaves on the tree were bright yellow by then, trembling on the branches and then falling in the lightest breeze, until the ground underfoot was crunchy with them. Sometimes, Blaze would be standing out on the front porch, exactly the way I had once imagined her doing, with my chubby-cheeked daughter on her hip. I don't believe any man has ever been happier than I was to look up and see those two, my precious girls, waiting for me.