“The boxes.”
“They can stay packed for a few days. I have to figure out what to tell the residency people. I have to call my agent. I have to call my mother.” She paused. “I might have to call your mother.”
“Probably.”
“You should warn her.”
“She's going to find out before I have a chance to warn her. The gossip mill around here works fast.”
“Good.”
I held her. After a long minute, she whispered against my collarbone. “Can I open the door for him?”
“He's not coming in until you tell him to.”
She turned her head toward the door. “Biscuit.”
The dog came through at a polite trot, registered the two of us, and sat down at my feet with his chin against my boot. Forgiveness, finally.
Soleil laughed against my chest. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh in over a week. I’d stolen her smile away from her, but now she had it back. I never wanted to be responsible for doing that again.
I held her. I held the back of her head with my hand. I closed my eyes against the gray morning light coming through the kitchen window and let myself, for the first time since I was a kid in the back room of a house in Broken Bend that had become mine in stages I hadn't noticed at the time, believe I had landed.
She tipped her face up to look at me.
“Can we have coffee,” she said. “And can you open the box on the table by the window. There's something inside I never told you about.”
I walked to the table and picked up the mountain ash box. I set my hand on the lid and looked back at her.
“Open it, Treyton.”
I opened it.
A folded piece of paper sat inside. It was sketched in pencil, dated three weeks ago. My hand rested on the underside of the bench at the lookout, with the columbine carved in. She had drawn it that night and folded it and put it in the box the morning after I gave it to her.
She had been keeping it.
I looked at her.
“They were yours,” she said. “All of them. And one of them was mine.”
I closed the lid, set the box down, and crossed the room to pull her into my arms again.
“I love you,” I said it against her hair. I’d been carrying it with me so long, the words had started to feel like part of my own body.
She didn't answer right away, just held on. Then she tilted her head back and smiled up at me. “I know. I love you too.”
Biscuit thumped his tail against my boot, satisfied.
EPILOGUE
SOLEIL
The aspens turnedthe last week of September.
Mae told me they would. I hadn’t been ready for what they actually looked like, which was the whole east face of Hollow Peak going gold at once, the way a room went gold when somebody turned the right lamp on. I stood on Treyton's porch—our porch—with my coffee in both hands at six in the morning, and I watched the light come up over the ridge and find the aspens. I even cried a little because it was so amazingly beautiful and I’d almost left before I got to experience it.
Biscuit laid at my feet. He was always at my feet now. He’d abandoned the porch step of cabin three and had decided his post was wherever I was. Treyton had taken it well, especially since Penny had decided she preferred his workshop over the farm up the road and kept him company every day while he worked.
