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Chapter Eight

As December rolled on toward midwinter, getting darker and colder as it went, Ruthie decided that the breathless, sharp punch of what little daylight Montana offered was actually delightful.

Maybe it was all those years under the Georgia sun that felt so gray and interchangeable in her compromised memory. Maybe it was what passed for winter down there. It had never been particularly cold, though her blood had always been thin enough to think she needed bundling up anyway. Maybe, deep down, she’d always craved real seasons.

Whatever it was, everything about Cowboy Point in the short, dark days that seemed to rush one into the next and on into weeks, felt like light inside of her.

Possibly this was because she was living in an actual, working lighthouse. Maybe it made sense that she would find the light in everything, because light was all around her.

Sure, she told herself. It’s definitely the building you’re in.

Her days took on a comfortable, pleasant shape. She would wake up in the morning and go down to have coffee at the counter by the kitchen, where there was always a carafe waiting for her, no matter what time she got up. After a restorative cup of Dallas’s high-test coffee, she usually got a workout in—running the spiral stair, making use of the small gym, or getting after a bit of a hike if the weather cooperated. When she was done and feeling good, Dallas was usually ready to cook her a hot breakfast if she liked, or give her access to the pastries he might have picked up down in Marietta or liberated from Helena’s coffee truck.

He usually ate with her, and they would talk about their individual workouts, or the things he was doing around the lighthouse or with his admin and advertising, or what her plans for the day were. It was always light. Easy.

Like they were just friends, she told herself. Like there was no history bearing down on them, thick and hot. And certainly no touching.

Ruthie told herself that was better. As December marched along, she told herself that the frenzy of her first couple of days here was an anomaly. That it was part of the amnesia of it all. That what mattered was that they could get along so well in all these quiet, daily moments.

Friends, she told herself happily, all the time.

And she kept her increasingly explicit and always smoking-hot dreams about him to herself.

After breakfast, she would shower and get dressed. Then, depending on the weather and how confident she felt about driving in it, Ruthie usually went back down to High Gully Yarn. Where she would sit at the big table, knit one of her latest projects, and chat with Imogen, who she’d met that first day. Imogen was the youngest in the Martin family, who ran an alpaca farm deeper into the Gallatin Range and had just transitioned their summer pop-up for fiber enthusiasts to the new, year-round experiment that Ruthie was sitting in.

Ruthie heard a lot about Imogen’s older brothers, who handled the ranching side of things. She met Imogen’s sisters, Viola and Portia, because the Martin daughters were the ones spearheading the fiber artist, artisan dyer, and yarn stockist side of things that were what would make the actual shop a go. If it was a go.

Though they were already doing a brisk mail order business, thanks to the past couple of summers they’d spent making appearances at farmers markets all over Montana and parts of Wyoming.

All of them could knit. And crochet. Portia liked to make complicated wall hangings that looked a lot like mountain sunsets, and displayed them all over the knitting shop. Viola was the one who made the clothes that they were selling, and took on bespoke projects, too.

And the more Ruthie hung out there, the more comfortable the Martin family got with her. They let her see the back rooms of the sprawling barn, where they experimented with other fiber art projects, dyed their own yarn, and had what amounted to their own workshops. Not to mention a cozy apartment upstairs for when the weather turned and they couldn’t make it back to High Gully Ranch, which was a good thirty-minute drive on single-track mountain roads on a good day.

It was a good life. Ruthie liked getting to be a part of it, in what little way she could. And despite being unable to remember making or keeping many friends in her previous life—though she was pretty sure she didn’t have many, because surely they would have turned up after the accident if she did—she found it incredibly easy to make friends with Imogen and her sisters. Maybe because we have a lot of things in common, she found herself thinking. She hadn’t simply found herself doing the same thing as them at the same time, like high school or Army-wifing. They all liked yarn, and could sit around talking—or not talking—for hours at that table, working on their current projects.

One of the best parts of sitting in a yarn store for hours at a time, day after day, was that Ruthie really got to know the local Cowboy Point women, not just the Martins. And not as Dallas Lisle’s estranged wife, though she knew that was likely how they thought of her. The knitting shop allowed everyone to come sit down and talk about knitting, so if any other topic snuck in, it felt softer. Less gossipy and more personal.

Not that men couldn’t be knitters. Up at the lighthouse, in the evenings, she and Dallas often sat in the lobby near the fire. Ruthie would knit and he would read, and she would see him watching her play with stitches and colors. Until one night, when she put some needles in his hand and taught him a few elementary stitches right there.

She knew that there were many men who liked to knit. But it was still mostly women who came into the yarn store, settled at the table, and—sooner or later—shared openly about their lives.

Ruthie met the pastor’s wife, Nevaeh Higgins, who came in with Old Mrs. Bonney. The old lady apparently lived with too many cats, had donated an old barn on her land to Matilda’s Pied Piper Rescue, and came in once a week or so to get bargain yarn because she made hats and socks for children in need that Nevaeh took to her husband’s church that was nestled down by the river. Ruthie met Esther Wayne, who was the sister of Deputy Sheriff Atticus Wayne, who oversaw Cowboy Point and the mountains beyond. Esther was dedicated to the true crime podcast she ran. A podcast that had quite a number of listeners, Ruthie had been surprised to learn when she looked it up. Esther often came in with her friends, Sara Jane Stark and Juliet Cross, and sometimes Flannery Bennett, who Ruthie discovered was not only Kitty’s sister, but the woman who organized Cowboy Point’s Farm & Craft Market on summer Saturdays.

She met Trinity Capshaw and Lauren Madigan who ran the Crowded Table restaurant with two of their college friends. Trinity crocheted to relax, Lauren knitted extremely complicated lace shawls, and they liked to come in a few days a week to escape from the restaurant and get some downtime in the peaceful atmosphere of the store.

Ruthie learned about the well-known families in town, and thought to herself that it was very interesting, the way women told those stories. Very different stories than she heard from Dallas. No one talked to her about card games or accusations of cheating in poker. Instead, they talked about Kendall Carey, the wife of the oldest of the Carey brothers, who’d had her second baby boy in October. They discussed the various Carey babies, and speculated openly about when Tennessee and Matilda might get in on that. Finn and Kitty, who were a bit newer, were given slightly more grace in the procreation stakes. As for Cat Lisle Carey and her nursing school thing, support for waiting to start making a family was concentrated more in the younger women. The older women thought life was too short.

They also spent a lot of time analyzing those wild Stark brothers—because not one of them is hard on the eyes, Viola liked to say when there were no Starks in the shop, and if they weren’t all stormy-eyed with jawlines to die for, no one would care if they were single—who’d astonished the town by turning to the law in recent years. Particularly shocking given how much time they spent trying to outrun the sheriff in their misspent youths, Portia confided when the shop was empty. But the women didn’t talk about how attractive the Stark brothers were or what shenanigans they’d engaged in while out carousing. Usually when they talked about them, what they really talked about was their mother—who had famously run off and left them, all under the age of five, for their useless father to raise.

“No wonder they ran amok,” one of the older women said during one such discussion. She was a knitter, with an Italian name, who lived with her husband on the same piece of property where the pizza place stood. “The only thing Steven Stark ever cared about was a bottle. It’s surprising those boys didn’t run off themselves.”

“I always thought they were lucky,” Sara Jane, cousin to the boys in question—boys who were fully grown men these days—replied. With a certain steel-edged serenity that made it very easy to imagine her running the small local library to her precise specifications. “I had a lot more rules to follow.”

Later, Imogen whispered about the terrifying Marlene, Sara Jane’s mother, who Sara Jane somehow managed to coexist with to this day, living with her and tending to her in her old age even though her personality hadn’t mellowed any. It couldn’t be me, Imogen said, sounding awed by Sara Jane.

Ruthie loved it. All of it. She loved it so much that she started questioning herself. Why was it that she could so easily enjoy herself when she was neck deep in the stories of strangers? She’d never met half the people that she was told about. Still, it made her feel connected to the town that she knew all these things about them, like they were all stitches in the same piece of colorful fabric, woven together to make a glorious whole.

And one night, while she was reading in bed—tucked away in her cozy little lighthouse room while the snow blew hard outside—it clicked. Grandma had always been the keeper of stories like these. All Ruthie had to do was mention a person in passing and Grandma could tell a multigenerational tale of that person’s entire genealogical background, with many asides to incorporate cousins, various moves to different states and back, and any pertinent local gossip about everyone involved.