"I love you."
"I know."
She laughs into my jacket.
Real laugh.
First real one I've heard in nine days and it lands in my chest like a homecoming, and I stand there on a sidewalk in Reno with a geologist in my arms and a cane at my feet and the mountains somewhere behind us, and I think.
I'm done living alone.
EPILOGUE
DELILAH
EIGHT MONTHS LATER
The test stick is on the edge of the bathroom sink and I am sitting on the closed lid of the toilet in one of Garrett's thermals, staring at two pink lines that came up so fast the control line was almost offended.
Ghost is lying across the bathroom doorway like the hallway isn't good enough anymore. He goes where I go now. Ten-year-old habit he picked up the first weekend I came back to the cabin and never put down.
"Good boy."
My voice sounds strange.
I press my palms flat to my thighs and breathe.
Eight months of us.
I took the AG office job for the spring. I finished the Crestview grand jury. The parent LLC got unspooled across three states. The contractor who came up that ridge looking forme pled out to federal conspiracy charges and is going to die in a cell. Six others followed him. My notebook ended up cited in a brief so many times a paralegal in Reno sent me a laminated copy of the cover page with a heart drawn on it.
Garrett took the Carson City coordinator job.
He hated the commute for about four weeks. Then he stopped commuting. Sold the idea of a hybrid position to his director and now he runs backcountry operations two days from the field and three from home, home being a cabin he expanded last fall with a second bedroom and a proper office for me and a greenhouse addition off the south wall because I mentioned once that I missed growing my own herbs and he had foundation poured the next month.
He doesn't say he loves me much. He doesn't have to. He builds me things.
Also he says it. He says it plenty. I was wrong about that.
We got engaged on a Tuesday in October because I refused to let him plan anything fancy. He dropped to one knee in the kitchen while I was elbow-deep in mixing dough for pizza. He had a ring in his pocket he'd been carrying for three weeks. He said my name and I said yes before he finished the sentence and Ghost barked once like he'd been waiting.
I haven't picked a wedding date.
Because I keep finding reasons to wait, which is ridiculous for a woman who made up her mind on a county pickup seat eight months ago.
Now I'm looking at two pink lines.
I reach for my phone. Stop. Put it down. Pick it up.
Text Patty Cole because Patty Cole is the only woman in Whisper Vale who will not give me advice and Patty has become a friend in a way I did not expect when I met her at the Mountain Bloom festival in May and she shoved a blueberry muffin into my hand and asked whose I was.
I type. Delete. Type again.
Patty. Two lines. Don't tell anyone. I mean it.
Three dots. Then.
Oh honey. Put your feet up. I'm gonna bring you a roast tomorrow. Does he know.
