Nessie winced. “Oliver, that’s not?—”
“It’s okay,” Maggie laughed. “He’s not wrong. I do build with salvaged materials.”
Oliver bounced in his seat. “River said you made a tiny house out of an old school bus! And that you can fix anything! He said you’re the smartest builder he’s ever seen!”
“Did he now?” Maggie’s chest felt suddenly too tight, her cheeks warming. “That’s very nice of him.”
“Anson said you write him better letters than anybody ever. And that you sent him a scarf one time when it was really cold. The red one and?—”
“Oliver,” Nessie interrupted gently. “Take a breath, honey.”
The boy launched into a breathless account of everything River had told him about Maggie’s work, his hands moving in wild arcs that threatened to send his crayons flying. Nessie mouthedsorryover his head, but Maggie waved her off. His enthusiasm was infectious, and something about being seen through a child’s unfiltered admiration—secondhand, through stories Anson and River had shared—loosened the knot between her shoulders she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying.
She stayed longer than she’d intended, answering Oliver’s rapid-fire questions about school buses and salvaged wood and whether she could build him a dinosaur fort, while Nessie pressed a warm cinnamon roll into her hands and refused to let her leave without eating it.
As Jonah walked her back to her cabin, he smiled. “So now you know.”
“Know what?”
“You’re already part of this place. Have been for years.”
She stopped walking and stared at the forge in the distance, where smoke curled from the chimney. Where Anson was probably working, waiting for her to return for the next feeding.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “For showing me.”
“That’s what operations managers do.” Jonah grinned. “We make sure everybody sees the bigger picture.”
Maggie pushed open the forge door, the familiar blast of warmth wrapping around her like a blanket. The rich scents of coal, hot metal, and woodsmoke filled her lungs, grounding her after the whirlwind tour. The kittens’ feeding time approached, but her mind still buzzed with everything she’d learned—how Anson had woven her into the fabric of his life here, sharing parts of her with the people who mattered to him while barely managing full sentences when she stood in front of him. The contradiction made her chest ache in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
Bramble lifted his head from where he lay curled protectively around the kittens’ house, his tail thumping once against the wooden floor in greeting. Anson sat at his workbench, hunched over something so small she couldn’t make it out at first. The muscles in his back shifted beneath his flannel as he worked, his large hands moving with surprising delicacy.
“What are you making?”
He startled slightly but didn’t look up. Between his thumb and forefinger, he held what appeared to be a tiny leather strap with a miniature buckle. “Collar. For Spark. He’s the escape artist.”
She peered over his shoulder at the tiny collar, perfect in its craftsmanship. The leather was soft and supple, the buckle small enough not to weigh down a kitten but sturdy enough to last. The care that had gone into making it—the thought of the future it represented—made her throat tighten.
“I met everyone,” she said, changing the subject before emotion overwhelmed her. “Jonah gave me the grand tour.”
“Yeah?” He set down the collar and turned toward her, actually meeting her eyes for a brief moment before looking down at the workbench. “What’d you think?”
The question itself was a shift—Anson asking about her impressions, inviting conversation rather than deflecting it. She pulled up the stool next to his, close but not touching.
“X showed off with Troubadour,” she began, watching Anson’s reaction carefully. “Ghost was silent and intense, just like you described in your letters, but Naomi seems to balance him out. They’re working on her campaign.”
Anson nodded and picked up the collar, turning it over and over as if checking for imperfections invisible to anyone else. “She’s going to win.”
“You admire her.”
“She fights for people who can’t fight for themselves. Hard not to respect that.”
This was the longest conversation they’d had that wasn’t about the kittens, and Maggie found herself relaxing into it, savoring the easy back-and-forth.
“I also met Jax and that beautiful dog of his—Echo, right? The one with the scars?” She leaned her elbows on the workbench, careful not to disturb his tools. “And Boone with the rescue horses. He didn’t say much.”
“Boone never does,” Anson said, the corner of his mouth quirking up. “Makes me look chatty.”
The small joke—an actual joke from Anson Sutter!—caught her by surprise, and she laughed. “Speaking of chatty, Oliver talks a mile a minute. He said you told him I can fix anything.”
