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Like all of these tales were tapestries, and the lives led and incorporated into the telling made them whole and radiant and real.

And Ruthie found that what she liked most of all was taking all of those stories she heard at the long, gleaming table at High Gully Yarn—tales woven in and out of each other and the whole of Cowboy Point—back to Dallas.

Lisle Lighthouse Inn was supposed to be a bed-and-breakfast. But on her third day in residence, Dallas had gruffly told her that he made himself food every night and if Ruthie was around, she was welcome to have some. That had turned into them sitting down for dinner every night. They sat at the counter near the kitchen, instead of at one of the tables that made up the dining room.

Because they were casual friends, Ruthie told herself.

She would sit at the counter and they would talk while he cooked. Then they would eat together, sitting side by side, and seemingly never running out of things to talk about. Not even when they transitioned out into the lobby to sit by the fire.

Especially when she could bring back salacious tales from the ladies in the knitting shop.

It was hard to imagine that she had ever lived anywhere else, she found herself thinking as snowstorms rolled in over the mountains and sometimes kept them trapped on the top of the hill for a day or two. Even waiting for storms to clear felt good. Everything was so comfortable, she would marvel when she crawled into her cozy bed each night. It was like she’d somehow accidentally stumbled into a life that fit her perfectly.

And as long as she kept her extremely detailed, excessively hot nightly dream affair with her ex-husband to herself, she was fine. Better than fine.

Friends.

What was dangerous was that she was starting to forget that she’d never intended to stay here so long. Sure, she’d told him that she planned to stay through New Year’s, but really, she hadn’t wanted to put a departure date down. Privately, she had kind of thought that she would look around such a tiny little town and then head somewhere else. Maybe go and see the Pacific Ocean, she’d thought. Maybe all the way to that wild, Pacific Northwest coast, all rocky shorelines and mountains hovering right there.

But somehow, she never managed to figure out an exit strategy. Instead, she sank into this routine of theirs as if she’d come here for the express purpose of playing house with Dallas Lisle. Playing friends in a house, that was.

“You can be honest,” Imogen said, in a leading way. They were sitting at the table in the front part of High Gully Yarn. Portia and Viola were wrestling with various dyes in the back, and they were otherwise alone in the shop.

Ruthie smiled down at her work, another sweater that she was almost finished making. “Am I not usually honest?”

Imogen shrugged. She had known who Ruthie was the second time Ruthie had come in—meaning, that she was the ex-wife and source of Dallas’s heartbreak—and had apologized profusely. Then had been as astonished as she was, maybe, a little grateful that Ruthie couldn’t remember Dallas at all.

Ruthie had found herself sharing her whole story easily—well, with a lot of Dallas’s details omitted, of course—because that was what the knit shop confessional demanded.

Imagine forgetting a man who looks like Dallas Lisle, Imogen had breathed.

I imagine that every day, Ruthie had replied, and they’d been friends from that moment on.

“I wonder if maybe, deep down, some part of you does recognize him,” Imogen said now. “Maybe you’re not conscious of it, but that would explain why you knew you had to come here. Why you left your whole life behind and chased after a lighthouse in the mountains. Maybe some part of you does know exactly who he is to you.”

Ruthie considered. “I’d like to think maybe that’s true,” she said, and she found as she said it that she meant it. Deeply. “But I don’t know if it is. Maybe I just want there to be a neat and tidy reason when really, it was just a postcard. And I needed a reason to leave.”

“Maybe,” Imogen echoed, though she didn’t sound convinced.

Ruthie wasn’t sure she was, either.

Later that evening, she made her way down the main road to Mountain Mama Pizza. Dallas and his siblings met there weekly for what they called the LPL club, meaning Lyle Patrick Lisle. Their rotten father. The club was not in his honor, Cat had told her. It was in spite of him. And as Dallas’s legal wife, Ruthie was more than welcome to attend.

That wouldn’t necessarily have gotten her to go, of course, but Dallas had insisted. Or encouraged, maybe. Friend to friend.

Tonight, there was light snow coming down and very little wind. It seemed nothing but festive as she hurried down the main road. Almost all of the buildings had those Christmas lights now. They gleamed into the night, and it was impossible not to feel as if she was wandering along in the middle of a Christmas card.

When she got into Mountain Mama’s, it was warm and happy inside, the same way it had been that first night. Only now, she recognized people. She waved at Kitty and Flannery and their sister Indy, rushing around in and out from behind the counter. She saw Dallas and his happy, messy family, gathered around the table they liked in one corner. And she smiled when she saw that Cat and Wilder were back from Bozeman, which meant Cat had completed her first round of finals.

She wove her way through the tables. She recognized the Carey brothers she’d heard so much about, sitting at a big table with a whole lot of babies and toddlers—and knew that the newest-looking one was named Keaton and already looked like his older brother Kiel and his daddy, Harlan. Thanks to the stories she heard all day, she knew that the two sets of twins—one set of boys, one set of girls—were Ryder and Rosie’s. And that meant the other little girl, tucked up in the lap of a cool blonde that Ruthie knew was Dr. Ramona Taylor of the local clinic, was Hailey Carey, who had been left on Knox Carey’s doorstep last Christmas.

It didn’t take much to conclude that the man beaming down at her from Ramona’s side was Knox. And that the older couple sitting together, holding hands in the middle of their big, loud family, were Zeke and Belinda Carey, who Ruthie had never heard a bad word about.

She recognized those same wild Stark brothers she kept hearing about, kicked up around a table of their own in one corner, with an older man who looked like them—but much more remote and ruthless—who had to be Jack Stark, the oldest of the Stark cousins who ran the lodge.

Recognizing all these people, knowing parts of their stories—Ruthie realized that these things made her feel at home. Like this was her home. That this, finally, was the place she could belong—

But that was a dangerous path to go down.