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She’s only eighteen when she gives birth to a tiny baby boy.
The labour lasts all night.
By the end of it Abigail can barely feel her hands. Sweat sticks her hair to her neck and her throat burns raw from screaming. The tent smells like blood and smoke and whiskey and damp canvas baking under Arizona heat that hasn’t fully faded even after sundown.
Susan Grimshaw kneels between Abigail’s legs with rolled sleeves and a face carved from stone.
“Push,” she orders again.
Abigail thinks she can’t. Thinks her body has already split itself apart enough times for one life. But then she feels one final sharp agony tearing through her bones and suddenly there’s a sound.
Susan turns the baby over with practised hands, clearing his mouth first, rubbing firmly at his tiny back.
“C’mon now,” she mutters under her breath, calmer than anybody has a right to be.
Then the baby finally sucks in a breath and a weak cry pierces the tent. Abigail gasps like she’s the one learning how to breathe again.
“There you are,” Susan says softly, wrapping the infant quickly in the worn remains of someone's old shirt. “Looks like you got yourself a boy.”
For months the baby had only been it. The child. John’s baby. Something half-real she carried beneath bruised ribs while still cooking over fires and running from town to town with outlaws.
Abigail lets out a broken sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Tears blur her vision so badly she can barely see him anymore.
“A boy?” she repeats weakly.
Susan nods once, gentler now as she brings him closer. “Tiny little thing, but he’s got lungs on him.”
The baby cries again, louder this time, fists twitching angrily against the cloth wrapped around him.
And despite the blood and exhaustion and terror still clawing through her body, Abigail smiles.
She’s never seen a newborn before. Never held one. The girls she knew growing up either lost theirs young or handed them off to relatives while they went back to work. Abigail only knows babies from passing glimpses through windows or women carrying them through crowded streets.
She strokes one finger down his cheek, terrified she might hurt him. Tears spill freely now, dropping onto the fabric wrapped around him, and in that moment she makes a promise. She’ll give him softness. Safety. Full bellies and warm beds. She’ll keep him far away from gun smoke and running and the kind of men who leave bodies in ditches. He’ll learn to read proper. He’ll have shoes that fit. Maybe someday a little house with blue paint and a porch and chickens scratching in the yard.
A life where he never has to steal to eat.
A life where he is loved enough to never doubt it.
“Ain’t he pretty?” Karen says softly, drawing Abigail out from her reverie. Her voice sounds strange, gentler than usual, though that might just be the blood loss talking.
Abigail looks down at him and smiles through exhausted tears.
“He’s perfect.”
Grimshaw clears her throat. “Lemme clean him up proper.”
Reluctantly, Abigail passes him over. Immediately, she feels the weight of the emptiness in her arms, as she watches Grimshaw carry the baby to the washbasin.
Every muscle in Abigail's body screams in protest, as Karen helps her sit up. The blankets beneath her are stained dark. Outside, she can hear horses shifting and the distant mutterings of those in the camp.
“How long they been gone?” Abigail asks weakly.
Karen exchanges a glance with Susan.
“Couple hours.”
Arthur, Javier and Sean, maybe Dutch too, had gone out robbing a bank in some sunbaked Arizona town whose name Abigail can’t even remember anymore.
As usual the money decides everything.
It decides whether they eat tinned beans or fresh meat this month. It decides whether they move camp again or whether Dutch buys ammunition or medicine. It decides whether there’s enough left over for blankets before winter.
It decides whether her son grows up hungry and cold.
The reality settles over her slowly. Her baby is going to open his eyes to this life first. Her baby, that doesn't even have name yet, is going to live a life in tents and stolen horses and whispered plans around campfires. To sleeping with one eye open. To gunshots in the distance and people who disappear overnight because they got caught or killed.
She looks around the cramped tent properly for the first time. She looks at the patched canvas walls, the crate serving as a table, the leaking lantern hanging overhead. This isn't a home, there's no crib, nothing to hold firm in her hands.
All she has to offer her son is love and hope. That's it.
The baby starts crying again while Susan wipes blood from his tiny legs with surprising tenderness. Abigail’s chest aches hearing it.
“He hungry already?” Karen asks.
“Probably,” Grimshaw mutters.
Abigail reaches for him immediately. “Give him here.”
The moment he’s back in her arms he quiets, still hiccuping softly. Abigail stares down at him while he roots blindly against her chest.
And suddenly she’s furious.
Furious at Dutch for filling their heads with dreams while they sleep in dirt. Furious at John for vanishing half the time because responsibility scares him more than anything. Furious at herself for believing any of this could ever become something better. But most of all she's terrified.
Because for the first time in her life, she has something to lose.
She's nineteen when she accepts that the father of her child, the man she thought she'd love forever, has left forever.
The first week, she was sure that he'd be back. A part of her that she hates, the part that still holds hope, has kept her standing.
Men leave camp all the time. Jobs run long. Trails go cold. People disappear for weeks and come swaggering back with some half-assed explanation and a sack of stolen money slung over their shoulder like that excuses everything.
So that first week, Abigail waits.
By the third week she's angry and she's tired. She hasn’t slept properly in days. Her breasts ache constantly and her back feels splintered from carrying her baby everywhere because he cries whenever she sets him down too long.
Abigail finds herself replaying every conversation her and John ever had, trying to figure out if there’d been signs she missed. Maybe he’d looked trapped. Maybe he’d regretted her the second she got pregnant. Maybe every soft moment between them had only meant something to her.
Sometimes she gets so furious she has to step away from the baby for a minute just to breathe.
Other times she still catches herself looking toward the road an that’s the part she hates the most. Hope keeps her standing when pride says she should’ve collapsed already.
The weeks turn to months and the camp moves twice. Summer burns into autumn. Her beautiful baby boy grows heavier on her hip and starts laughing properly now, loud delighted little squeals that make even Grimshaw soften around the edges.
People stop mentioning John after a while. Dutch talks around the subject with fake gentleness, like John died instead of choosing to leave. Hosea watches Abigail with sad knowing eyes but never says anything cruel enough to be honest. Arthur is the only one who looks genuinely angry about it and that should make her feel better but something burns in her chest and tightens in her stomach when she catches Arthur watching her baby with anger in his eyes but also a softness that seems to betray Arthur's character. There's nothing either of them can do but hold onto their anger and hold on tighter to this bigger-than-life toddler.
One afternoon, Abigail sits near the fire with her son in her lap while she darns one of Dutch’s shirts badly enough that Grimshaw will probably make her do it again later.
Her baby squirms constantly these days. He’s all restless limbs and curiosity, forever trying to throw himself out of her arms to chase after things he shouldn’t. He’s at that age now where he wants to explore everything. Rocks end up in his mouth if nobody watches him close enough. He trips over his own feet at least six times a day but always gets back up looking deeply offended by the ground itself.
“Sit still,” Abigail mutters as he nearly kicks the needle from her hand.
Her toddler only laughs.
Nearby, Arthur sits by the fire cleaning his gun while Javier strums absentmindedly at his guitar. The rest of camp drifts around them lazily in the afternoon heat.
Abigail shifts her son higher on her hip. “You are trouble, you know that?” Her baby grabs clumsy handfuls of her shirt and beams at her.
Then suddenly, clear as anything despite the constant babbling that seems to stream out of her baby's mouth: “Ma-ma.”
Everything around her seems to stop.
Javier’s playing falters. Tilly looks up from where she’s peeling potatoes.
The baby grins proudly at all the attention.
“Ma-ma,” he says again gurgling happily and louder this time.
Abigail stares at him.
Everyone always said his first word would be dada. She remembers Tilly teasing her about it while she was still pregnant, remembers Karen insisting babies always reach for their fathers first. Even Abigail had half expected it, despite everything.
“Oh,” Abigail whispers, her throat tight suddenly. “That’s me, baby.”
He laughs happily and reaches up to pat her face with sticky hands.
A few weeks later, the baby is wobbling around camp on unsteady legs while Abigail hangs laundry.
“Careful!” she calls automatically as he nearly walks face-first into a crate. Arthur catches the back of the boy’s shirt before disaster can strike.
“Easy there, little man.”
“John Junior,” Abigail warns, “you stop runnin’ around before you hurt yourself.”
Arthur makes a face that is almost unbecoming of a man his age. “Kid’s too little for a name like John Junior.”
Abigail rolls her eyes. “Well, he can’t stay ‘kid’ forever.”
Arthur cants his head and glances down at the toddler, who’s trying very hard to eat a leaf. “Hm.” He pulls the leaf from the boy’s hand. “Looks more like a Jack to me.”
Abigail pauses.
“Jack?” Mary-Beth repeats from nearby with a laugh.
Arthur shrugs. “I dunno. Just fits him.”
The toddler looks up like he knows everyone's talking about him grins, this huge wide grin. And somehow… it does fit. It's simple and warm and entirely his own.
Abigail looks down at her little boy and smiles faintly.
“Jack,” she says softly.
The boy giggles again like he approves.
She’s not yet twenty when he comes back.
The worst part is that she still loves him. Not in the same way she used to because things will never be the same. She's no longer that sixteen year old girl with the blind, foolish devotion she once carried around like a second heartbeat. But the love is there still, buried deep and ugly beneath months of anger and loneliness and nights spent crying quietly so she wouldn’t wake Jack.
Because this is John.
John with his crooked grin and restless hands and eyes that always looked a little lost even before he left. John who kissed her like she was something precious one moment and disappeared the next. John who made her feel chosen right up until the moment he proved she wasn’t.
She hates him for leaving but she hates him more for coming back. And she hates herself most of all because when she first sees him again, standing there dusty and thin and alive, some awful aching part of her still feels relief before rage.
Then Jack squirms against her chest and that feeling hardens immediately.
Because while John was gone, Jack learned how to laugh. How to walk. How to say mama in that sleepy little voice that makes Abigail’s whole chest ache. He got fevers and scraped knees and nightmares. He cried for hours some nights and Abigail held him through every second of it alone and John missed all of it.
He missed Jack’s first steps beside the fire while everyone in camp cheered loud enough to scare him into crying afterwards. He missed the first time Jack laughed so hard milk came out his nose. He missed every tiny important thing that stitched a child together.
She looks at John now and feels two things at once: love and fury, tangled together so tightly she can’t separate them anymore. Part of her wants to scream at him. Wants to hit him hard enough to make him feel even half of what she felt waking up every morning alone. Another part wants to grab him and beg him never to leave again.
She does neither. Instead she looks down at Jack, at her beautiful boy with his curls sticking up from sleep and his tiny hand fisted in her dress. Suddenly the answer seems painfully simple.
Jack deserves more than this.
He deserves more than stolen moments between robberies. More than growing up surrounded by gun smoke and grief and men who disappear whenever life becomes difficult. More than a mother who loves him desperately but cannot give him the world by herself.
She doesn't need John to become a better man for her, she needs this for Jack. Everything is for Jack because Abigail would crawl through hell itself if it meant giving her son the life he deserves.
Even though, John refuses to look her in the eye, refuses to hold her son, their son, Abigail makes herself one final promise to give her son the father and the life he deserves.
Even if it breaks her heart all over again.