“Is there another reason you drove across the country, Grant Scott?”
His eyes held hers steadily beneath the brim of the Stetson.
“No,” he said softly. “Came because a Scott doesn’t let the woman he loves handle the heavy lifting alone.”
Emotion hit her so hard it nearly hurt.
Grant squeezed her hand once.
“Let’s go home, Iz.”
“Yeah,” she whispered.
“Let’s go.”
EPILOGUE
Three Months Later
Second Light Gallery — Main Street, Sylva, North Carolina
The old Woolworth building glowed against the sharp mountain night.
Warm light spilled through the tall front windows onto the Main Street sidewalk, where locals and visiting collectors drifted beneath strings of white bulbs wrapped around the brick archways. Above the rooftops, the courthouse clock tower rose against a deep indigo Blue Ridge sky.
The gallery was alive.
They had spent three months tearing the interior down to its bones. While Izzy was in Denver closing the gallery and her life there, Caitlin and the Scott brothers had been working the building in shifts. Burke and Grant spent their evenings off in work shirts and toolbelts, pulling out old drywall to expose the original brick, rewiring the high joists, and sanding the wide-plank floors until the oak gleamed beneath the new track lighting.
Izzy and Caitlin had logged long days on the curation—matching frames, mapping sight lines, and finding a way to blend modern presentation with the building’s rough, mountain history.
The brass plaque beside the double doors read, in clean, deep-cut lettering:
Second Light Gallery
Isabella Moreno & Caitlin West, Proprietors
“If one more deputy tries to smuggle a blackberry bourbon cupcake out of here before the toast, I’m locking the back kitchen,” Willow called from behind the catering station, still smiling as she shifted a tray of cheeses.
Deputy Baker, caught mid-reach, didn’t even look ashamed. “I’m on security detail, Willow. I need the glucose.”
“You need a lecture,” Marylou from the visitor center said cheerfully as she floated past with glossy exhibition catalogs for a couple up from Atlanta.
Near the front windows, Leigh guarded the dessert table, while Mabel held court in an emerald wrap in the center of the room. Back by a structural timber, Scout Wilson watched the crowd with his usual quiet amusement, Sara Parker beside him. A few feet away, Luke Hale raised his eyes from Jenkins, met Sara’s eyes, and shared a small, quick smile before they both looked away.
Near the hallway to the offices, Naomi stood with a glass of sweet tea, boots planted like she’d helped hang every beam in the place. “Rosie and Steve are exiled to the back room,” she was telling a laughing cluster of locals, “on account of not understanding that thousand-dollar paintings aren’t chew toys.”
A muffled bark carried faintly from somewhere behind the catering prep door, as if to prove her point.
Beneath a sweeping oil of the North Line at golden hour, Burton and Maggie Scott stood side by side. Maggie’s handrested in the crook of his arm. Burton looked older under the gallery lights, the gray in his beard more noticeable, but his shoulders were easy. The hard, watchful edge he’d carried since 1999 was gone.
“You’re pacing,” a low voice murmured.
Izzy turned, her hand finding Grant’s automatically as his fingers closed around hers. She wore a simple plum dress that bared her shoulders, her dark hair loose around her neck.
“There are at least three hundred people in this building, Scott,” she said quietly, her thumb tracing his knuckle. “I’m allowed to pace.”
Grant’s mouth tipped up. His silver-belly Stetson cast a soft shadow over his eyes. He wore a charcoal blazer and white shirt, but he still looked like the man who’d pulled her out of the dirt on the ridge.
