"Yep."
She stared at him for three full seconds over her reading glasses. "I'm going to need the whole sentence, hon."
"I do."
"That's the one." She shook her head, just barely, in my direction. "Every time."
Governor chose the vows to headbutt Cliff's hand. He scratched behind the cat's ears without looking down, his attention still on me, and I watched his thumb move gently overthe cat's head while Governor leaned into it with his eyes half-closed. That was just how his hands worked when something small pressed against them.
I felt it in my stomach.
"Do you, Nell Chambers —"
"I do." My boardroom voice. Steady, measured, the voice that had closed seven-figure consulting contracts. It sounded absurd in this room and I knew it and I couldn't find a different one.
"Good," Barbara said quietly. "You two are going to be interesting."
He opened the ring box. A simple gold band from the app's concierge service. But his fingers were warm when he took my hand, and his thumb pressed against my knuckle as the ring slid on, and the gold carried the heat of his pocket, and for two seconds that ring and the pressure of his hand were the only things in the room.
I gave myself two seconds. Then I straightened my shoulders and leveled my chin and reminded myself that this was a transaction.
She offered pie. We declined. At the door, Barbara squeezed my arm and looked at Cliff.
"He forgets to eat when he's working. You look like you won't let that happen." Then, louder: "Bring her back."
"I will."
"He will forget. You remind him."
I liked Barbara. Liking anyone in Cedar Bluff wasn't part of the plan, which was the first of what I suspected would be several miscalculations.
We got back in the truck. The road climbed past the last houses and into forest, and the landscape shifted. The light was lower now, amber, and shadows pooled in the valleys below. We were inside the mountains, not approaching them. The river I'dheard earlier was beneath us, its sound reaching up through the trees.
My husband was driving. I turned the word over and it didn't fit anywhere comfortable. I looked at the ring on my left hand, resting on my knee, and felt the lingering warmth of his thumb on my knuckle.
Cliff pointed through the windshield at a ridge where snow held on against dark rock. "That's Sawtooth. Ice comes off in another couple weeks."
It was the most he'd volunteered in one sentence. I added it to the gray eyes and the callused hands and the way he'd scratched a cat's ears during his own wedding. The list was getting longer than I wanted it to be.
The cabin appeared around a final bend and I stopped expecting what I'd expected.
I'd pictured a shack. A hunting cabin with a woodstove and questionable plumbing, because that was the version of "mountain man" my research had prepared me for. What I saw was a timber-frame house with a pitched roof and a stone chimney, a covered porch with two wooden chairs facing the river, which ran wide and fast thirty yards below. An outbuilding sat fifty yards up the slope. I could see gear racks through the open door, which matched what I knew from his profile. Wilderness guide. This was where he worked.
But the cabin itself was a home.
Inside: an open main room, kitchen along one wall with a butcher block counter, a cast-iron pan on a hook, herbs in small pots on the windowsill catching the last light, two stools at the counter. A small wooden table near the kitchen window with two chairs, made by hand or chosen with care. The living area had a woodstove, bookshelves with cracked spines, a wool rug in deep reds. Windows on three sides let the mountain in.
"Signal comes back here," Cliff said, tapping a small device near the ceiling. "Cell booster for the business. Internet's satellite, router's by the bookshelf."
A short hallway led to the bedroom on one side, bathroom on the other. The bedroom door was open.
One bed. A handmade quilt in deep blues and greens, and the colors were so close to the landscape outside the window that I stopped in the doorway. The stitching was uneven. Someone had worked by hand, making decisions row by row. The blues shifted. The greens were all different greens.
"Who made this?" I asked.
"My mother." He said it simply, from behind me in the hallway, with no story and no elaboration. I could tell from his voice alone that I shouldn't ask more. Not yet.
The quilt was beautiful. I stood there longer than I meant to.
