This is Halloween By Sarah Branson
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
Midwife. Halloween. A Pennsylvania hill town. A ghost with an agenda. A historian with patient eyes.
Jules Lockwood, nurse-midwife and family nurse practitioner, wants two years of loan forgiveness and a one-way ticket to Australia. Her obstacle: a town that keeps finding reasons to need her.
Eli Matthews, Blue Spruce Hills town historian, is the kind of man who came back when it mattered and stayed. He brings coffee every morning without being asked.
Agnes Bell, midwife, 1856 to 1931, has been waiting in Blue Spruce Hills since her death for the right pair of hands to pass her work to. She has found them. She is not subtle about it.
On Halloween night, when the veil between past and present is at its thinnest, everything Jules came to Blue Spruce Hills to avoid arrives at once.
Excerpt:
Agnes was extraordinary. Jules had worked with good colleagues and great colleagues and once, briefly, with a mentor who had changed the way she understood the work entirely. None of them had been like this. Agnes guided without directing, suggested without insisting, offered information at the precise moment it was needed, and went silent when silence was the better medicine. She moved around the room with the efficiency of someone who had done this in farmhouses by lamplight, when the only tools she had were her knowledge and her hands. Which, Jules thought, was exactly what she had done for forty years in exactly this kind of room.
Roberta was on the bed, on her hands and knees, her head resting on her brother’s shoulder. Eli sat in front of her, holding her shoulders, whispering reassurances: “You’re doing incredible, Rob.” Jules had been right about him that first day. He was load-bearing. Structural. The whole room organized itself around him without anyone noticing. She noticed.
The next contraction came, and Jules coached Roberta to breathe and not give in to the urge to push. The little bottom appeared, then one plump leg dropped, then another. Agnes instructed quietly, “Keep your hands off. Watch for the rotation.” Jules appreciated the coaching. She had seen breech births on videos, but in the hospital they were almost always cesarean. This was her first, and she needed Agnes’s guidance.
With the next contraction, the baby rotated and flexed. Roberta groaned as her body pushed. The abdomen and chest appeared, then one arm, then the other. Jules moved to the floor. “Okay, just like we talked about — scoot to the edge, then push.”
The baby hung from Roberta, and Roberta pushed. Agnes said in Jules’s ear, “Push on the sternum, just a little.” Jules took two fingers and pushed; the chin, then the nose appeared, and suddenly a baby was in her hands. A very quiet baby, eyes closed.
“The veil is thin,” Agnes whispered. “You need to part it.”
Jules rubbed the little girl’s back, then did what she knew she needed to do. She leaned over and breathed into her tiny mouth and nose. Once. Twice.
With a sputtering cough, the newborn cried, and Jules felt the whole room relax into joy.
“Oh.” Roberta was weeping as she gently touched her new daughter. “Thank you, Jules. You saved her.”
“I did what she needed,” Jules said. “You brought her to life.”
The baby had arrived at eleven fifty-one on the night of October thirty-first, bottom first, into Jules’s hands, in a farmhouse on County Road 7 with a pumpkin still lit on the porch and the sound of the last trick-or-treaters fading somewhere down the hill. Now, a minute after birth, she was pink and outraged and vocal about her journey, announcing herself to the room and the night and, presumably, to whatever was on the other side of the thinned veil, with the confidence of someone who had chosen her moment and was satisfied with the choice.
Jules laughed. It came out of her without permission, the way good things do — breathless, shaky, real.
Agnes stood at the foot of the bed and watched the baby’s first minutes in the world with an expression Jules had never seen on her before: not the professional assessment, not the knowing smile. Something unguarded and full — the expression of someone who has witnessed something hundreds of times and to whom it has never, not once, been ordinary.
“Halloween,” Jules said softly, to no one in particular.
“Yes,” Agnes said.
About Author
Award-winning feminist speculative fiction author Sarah Branson spent close to thirty years as a midwife before turning to fiction, writing tales of action, adventure, revenge, and romance rooted in the strength and resiliency of the human spirit. Her New Earth universe imagines a future where diversity of identity is simply the texture of life, with honors including the 2022 Kindle Book Award for science fiction, the 2025 Wishing Shelf Book Award Gold Medal for A Pirates’ Pact, and a Foreword Indie Award Honorable Mention for For the Love of Glitter. Her two newest releases expand beyond New Earth: This Is Halloween, a cozy women’s fiction novella in the Blue Spruce Hills series (September 17, 2026), and Life Ends, Love Remains: A Revolutionary Ghost Story, a literary paranormal novel set in Ridgefield, Connecticut (early October 2026). Sarah lives with her husband in Connecticut.
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