Ten months ago, Rip Wheeler and Beth Dutton were told their newborn daughter hadn’t survived. They buried an empty casket, mourned a baby they never got to hold, and somehow learned to live with the unbearable grief of losing the child they’d dreamed about for months. Then, on an ordinary morning, the hospital calls. An internal investigation has uncovered years of corruption inside the maternity ward. Medical records had been forged, birth and death certificates falsified, and several newborns illegally removed from their biological parents. One of those babies was Beth and Rip’s little girl. She never died. She’s alive. Ten months old. The people caring for her weren’t a loving family at all—they were simply an emergency foster placement who had done the bare minimum while waiting for the system to decide what to do with her. They had no interest in keeping her and, once the truth came out, were more than willing to hand her over. By the afternoon, a caseworker pulls through the gates of Yellowstone with a sleepy little girl strapped into a car seat, clutching a well-worn stuffed bunny and looking around with wide, uncertain eyes. The moment Rip lifts her into his arms, every wall he’s spent ten months building around his grief comes crashing down. She doesn’t cry. Instead, she quietly rests her head against his shoulder, her tiny hand gripping the collar of his jacket as if she’d always belonged there. Beth is crying before she even reaches them, gently cupping her daughter’s little face, covering her cheeks, forehead and curls in kisses she’d been waiting ten months to give. Rip refuses to let her go for the rest of the day, carrying her around the ranch tucked safely against his chest while everyone watches in stunned silence. That night, after a warm bath, a bottle, and more cuddles than she has ever known, the little girl falls asleep sprawled across Rip’s chest in front of the fire, one chubby hand wrapped around Beth’s finger while Beth strokes her soft hair over and over, unable to stop looking at her. Neither of them sleeps much. They simply hold their daughter close, overwhelmed by the joy of finally having her home and haunted by the thought that ten months of her life had been stolen from all three of them.