He looked at me for a long time. He could not say it. It was the most obvious thing about him in that moment. The massive, scarred logger who could fell a spruce tree and drag himself out of an icy river with a shattered leg was completely incapable of looking me in the eye and lying to me.

He let out a breath that he had apparently been holding since October.

He reached forward, pulling me into him with his four-fingered hand and his whole scarred arm. He held me with the careful, desperate ferocity of a man who had not allowed himself to hold anything in three years. I wrapped my arms around him, burying my face against his dusty canvas coat, and I felt the long, rigid tension in his back finally, reluctantly, give way.

The heavy wooden front door of the cabin opened six inches.

“Oh, no,” Foy said.

Her voice had the flat, decisive tone of a seven-year-old who has just witnessed something shocking and has very strong opinions about it.

Immediately, Kit’s arm appeared through the crack in the door, grabbing his sister by the collar and pulling her firmly back inside. “Leave them alone,” he whispered, with the world-weary authority of a nine-year-old who had assessed the situation and determined it was not a crisis.

“But they’re—I know!” Foy protested softly. There was a pause. “Is she staying?”

A longer pause.

“Yeah,” Kit said finally. “She’s staying.”

The door clicked shut.

Vance pressed his face into my hair and very quietly laughed. It was a raw, unpracticed sound—the sound of something that hadn’t been used in a long while and was still remembering exactly how it worked. I felt the warmth of it settle deep in my chest like a coal catching fire.

“You’re a difficult woman,” he whispered against my hair.

“You have no idea,” I told him.

We stood there on the porch as the sun finally dropped below the ridgeline. The thick leather fold of money sat completely ignored on the wooden railing beside my cold tea.

Outside, the spring creek ran loud over the rocks, carrying three winters of ice downstream toward the valley settlements. The mountain stood exactly where it had always stood, massive and entirely indifferent. But inside that homestead on the crown lease, fifteen miles up from Briar Crossing, a woman from Guelph and a man who had forgotten how to hold on finally, stubbornly, chose each other.

The frontier rewards exactly that. Iron will, honest work, and the courage to say plainly what you want before it’s too late to say it. I had crossed an entire country to find a life worth keeping. I had found one. It looked absolutely nothing like what I had originally planned.

It was fourteen miles longer, three degrees colder, and exactly right.