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The way he looked at her then made her heart ache a bit in her chest. It wasn’t pity. That would have been different. She wouldn’t have liked it. This was something else, and she was fairly certain that it was a deep sympathy based on the things he knew about her that she didn’t. It made her throat feel tight.

“You were in the boat,” he said, confirming it. “And maybe I’m happy that you can’t remember any of these things, Ruthie, because it seems profoundly unfair to me that you had to be present at two different accidents that stole people you love from you.”

She felt her breathing go ragged. “Three,” she said.

When he looked like he didn’t understand her, she smiled faintly.

“Three,” she said again. “I lost my parents, my grandmother who raised me, and my husband, apparently. I assume I was present for that too. So…three.”

And the look of stark heartbreak that moved over his face then about killed her.

But he kept moving toward his truck. Then he opened the door for her to climb in, in a matter-of-fact way that made it clear he always did that. Just the way he’d done up at the lighthouse before, too. Like he was just that gentlemanly.

Like that was who he was.

And in the time it took him to circle around the back of his truck and climb into the driver’s seat, Ruthie tried to get herself under control. She tried to make herself breathe easy and get that heartbeat back to reasonable levels.

But it didn’t work.

He pulled out of the lot and she thought he would head directly up to the lighthouse, but instead, he drove her around Cowboy Point.

It was just the one main road, really. There were other roads that branched off it, but they were much more narrow, like suggestions of roads. A lot like the one she’d bumped up last night to get to the lighthouse.

He drove her in the direction of the mountain that loomed there—Copper Mountain, she reminded herself—and then turned around before he committed to that slippery, icy drive back down into Marietta. It was warm inside the truck and she snuggled into her parka and that scarf he’d given her, and listened as he pointed out the library on one side and the small sheriff’s station next to it. The doctor’s clinic across the way, and then the various buildings—some that only came to life in the summer. Others that were under development, and more still that just stood there, abandoned or just not used for anything public.

He told her stories about where different roads led. One he nodded at, telling her it led out to a farm in the mountains, where one of his half siblings had a plan to grow particular herbs and vegetables for the cook she’d seen in the pizza place.

“Wait, you’re connected by marriage to that pizza?” She wrinkled up her nose. “Why is that so delightful?”

“My brother, Finn, is married to Kitty Bennett,” Dallas told her. “Half brother, to be precise, which I’m usually not. Helena’s full brother.”

“It’s the pizza part that I’m most interested in.” Ruthie sighed. “Because that was delicious. And if I knew that I could get a family discount on it every time I went, I think I would get three pizza meals a day.”

Dallas shot her an amused look, which did things to her insides that she decided not to look at too closely. “It’s actually a serious problem,” he said, deadpan.

And they both smiled.

He told her the stories of the town in centuries past that, the way he told it, infused everything that went on now. The miners who trooped up from the valley floor, seeking their fortune in copper, which they never found. Those who’d gone back down and then maybe farther west versus those who’d stayed. The Lisles. The Careys—

Ruthie perked up at that. “Your sister is a Carey, right?”

Dallas shuddered. “Please don’t ever say that again. My sister is a Lisle. Who happens to be married to a Carey. But we don’t like to talk about it.”

She could see, from the way his mouth curved, that he didn’t mean that. Or he did mean it, but more affectionately than not, she thought. “Do you not like her husband?”

“I can’t express to you how impossible it is for me to answer that question.” Dallas was definitely grinning then. “But between you and me, and I would deny this if asked, I think Cat made a good choice. Wilder Carey is a good man.” He made a low noise. “For a Carey, of course.”

He drove her up the other side of the little Cowboy Point Valley, past the animal rescue his sister-in-law Matilda ran and the deliberately divey bar he said everybody ended up at, sooner or later. He took them up a hillside dotted with cabins, many of them with Christmas decorations, and at the top of the hill he pulled into the parking lot of the big, rambling old lodge that stood there.

“The Starks are responsible for this.” He nodded up at the building, a very graceful and lovely old thing that Ruthie could see had gotten some love lately. “It’s a very long story about a set of brothers who couldn’t agree on anything and preferred to fight about it forever, and their kids, who restored the building to its former glory the way it should have been all along. It just opened again last summer.”

“And the family runs it?” Ruthie peered up at the old lodge that made her think of the age of railways, crisscrossing the west. Something she’d always thought sounded romantic and relaxing. She’d watched too many videos online about sleeper trains from places like Seattle that made their way across the country. She’d imagined sitting in one, watching the world slip by out the window.

“Yes and no,” Dallas was saying. “The Starks are all over this town.” He told her about Sarah Jane, the local librarian. About his sister-in-law Matilda’s sister Rosie, who was also a Carey now. Married, in fact, to Wilder Carey’s twin. He told her about Jack Stark, who was the one who had spearheaded the renovation project and who ran the lodge as a hotel now.

He also told her about the three wild, motherless Stark brothers, who everyone thought would shuffle around the lodge for the rest of their lives. Getting by during the day so they could continue carousing at night, something they were apparently very good at.

Except everything had changed a while back. And now they were all in law enforcement and no, despite the commentary around town, it wasn’t a joke.