Brock Green stood at the tree line with a folding saw in one hand and six weeks until the first hard freeze. The clearing behind him was flat, sheltered, and useless without walls. He had chosen this ground because Nova pointed at it last spring and said she wanted a porch here, a kitchen there, and a room for a child by the second winter. He had torn up a contract to make that promise real. Now the promise weighed forty tons of standing spruce, and he owned a saw meant for firewood. He walked the property once more and counted what he had. Two axes, both light. A hand saw. A coil of rope. No draft animal, no mill, no forge. He had drawn the house on the back of a supply receipt, a big place with wide windows and a steep roof, the kind he had seen once in a lumber town down south and never stopped picturing. To raise it he needed felling axes, a two-man crosscut, wedges, chain, and a team. He had cash for maybe half. The nearest outfitter was two days out by sled, and every day he spent traveling was a day the ground hardened past digging. Nova came out of the tent in her white fur coat and green sweater, boots crunching the frost, and asked him what he was going to do. He told her the truth. He said he could not build this house alone, and he could not buy his way out of it either. He went to the settlement that afternoon and knocked on Collin Blackish's door. Collin listened, poured coffee, and led him to a shed behind the cabin. Inside hung his late father's tools: a crosscut saw oiled and wrapped, two felling axes, a broadaxe, splitting wedges, and a set of timber dogs. Collin said Brock could borrow all of it through the winter if he helped cut Collin's own woodpile first. Brock agreed before the coffee cooled. He loaded the sled that evening and hauled the tools back to the clearing under a sky already dropping snow. Nova met him at the tent and ran her hand along the crosscut's teeth. The tools were his now, on loan. The clock was not. Six weeks had become five, and the first spruce still stood.

The last nail went in on a Tuesday morning, two weeks after the twins came home. Brock stepped back from the porch and looked at the roof line. The storm that had pounded the clearing for nine days had blown itself out overnight. Snow lay clean on the pitch. Two chimneys stood straight against a pale sky. He had built it by hand with borrowed tools, and it was done. He walked back to the rented red house and told Nova to put her coat on. She was feeding Pisces on the couch. Leo was asleep in the basket at her feet, no fever, no rattle in his chest, only the small even breath of a baby who had decided to stay. She looked at Brock's face and did not ask why. She wrapped both boys in the wool blankets her brother had brought over and carried Leo out to the sled. Brock carried Pisces. The path was short and the wind had died. He opened the front door and let her go in first. She stood in the main room and counted. Seven bedrooms. Five baths. A kitchen wide enough for a long table. A hearth already laid with kindling. She walked the hall and opened each door and did not speak until she reached the nursery at the end. He had painted the walls green and cut wooden dinosaurs from scrap pine and nailed them in a line above the two cribs. She touched one with her finger. "Two cribs in one room," she said. "On purpose." "They should share," Brock said. "For now. There's room for five more down the hall when we need it." She turned and looked at him. "Five more." "However many you want." She laid Leo in the left crib and Pisces in the right. Leo opened his eyes and looked at his brother through the slats. Pisces stared back. Neither of them cried. Nova pulled the blanket up to Leo's chin and stood there a long time. Then she went to the hearth and struck the match herself. The kindling caught. Smoke pulled up the flue clean, no backdraft, no smoke in the room. Brock watched her feed the fire and understood that her job by the fire had just changed. It was her fire now, in her house, and she would keep it burning for a family that was going to grow. That night they slept in the new bedroom under a real roof for the first time. The wind stayed low. Brock lay awake and listened to the house settle around them. He had built what he promised. The arc of the winter had bent, and they had come through it with two sons alive and walls that would hold. But the house was empty of everything a house needs. No stores in the pantry. No woodpile stacked against the north wall. Only the fire Nova had lit, and a long winter still ahead of it.

Two winters had passed since Nova lit the first fire in the log cabin. The twins were three now. Leo and Pisces ran the halls in wool socks and knocked into the legs of the long table. Brock had stacked the north wall with cordwood twice over. The pantry held jars of meat from Collin and roots from the cellar. The house held. Brock spent that morning splitting kindling on the porch while snow fell in slow flakes over the clearing. He came in with an armload of wood and found the boys at the hearth, pushing wooden dinosaurs across the stone. Nova stood at the top of the stairs. She held two white sticks in her hand. She came down one step at a time and did not stop until she was in front of him. "We did it again," she said. She turned the sticks so he could see. One showed a cross. One showed a single line that had bloomed into two. "Both positive. Twins." Brock set the wood down on the hearth. He looked at the tests, then at the boys on the floor, then at the hall that ran past the nursery to five empty rooms. He had told her, standing in that nursery, that he wanted more. He had built the house wide on purpose. He took the sticks from her hand and held them careful, like they might tip. "How long have you known?" "Since this morning." She put her hand flat on her stomach. "Rowan called before you came in. She took hers yesterday. Two lines. Collin's gene held." She looked up at him. "Four babies coming to this town by summer. Two of them ours." Brock pulled her against his chest and held her there. Over her shoulder he watched Leo hand Pisces a dinosaur without being asked. The house had walls that would hold. It had a fire she kept burning. It did not yet have cribs for two more, or stores for six mouths through a long winter, or a midwife who would come this far out. He had answered the question he set himself two years ago. A new one had already opened under his feet.