“Before I go,” he said, cleaning his glasses on a well-used handkerchief, “a final note: Penny also instructed me to conveya message if and when this day came.” He handed me a small envelope with my name in her handwriting.
I opened it. A letter lay inside.
Sweet girl,she’d written, ink whispered across the paper.A fire resets a field. It does not end it. Let the new things grow. Life bends. You bend, too,but you do not break. Love with an open heart. Stay where you are loved and happiest.
Aunt P.
I closed the letter and held it to my heart.
“Thank you,” I told Browne.
He nodded, then smiled, real and big. “Mission complete,” he said, looking up at the heavens.
When his truck disappeared down the lane, the work picked up its cadence. Click, click, set. Snow sifted down like confetti. We raised the last two trusses before noon and fastened purlins until the barn began to look less like a sketch and more like a barn.
“Dinner,” Sue called over the noise.We all jostled for a place around a small bonfire to get warm and eat. Cassie served apple slices, and one by one, stories of Penny started to circle around the fire, each with its own mishap or chaos.
I sat next to Austin and let my eyes take a mental picture: neighbors around a fire, the barn’s silver lines, the dark thread of the river beyond, and the icing on the cake, the house, ours, in the middle. The people who’d made a circle around our worst night were still here, helping me rebuild.
Austin looked at me, bowl in hand, breath fluffing the air white.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
I nodded. “I’m home,” I said, my heart pounding with pride and excitement.
He smiled then, low and dazzled. “Yeah,” he said. “You are.”
We finished dinner and went back to work with what little light we had left. It wasn’t long before the crew peeled away with promises to return tomorrow. We tarped the remaining panels.
By the time the last pickup rolled down the lane, the night sky was dark.
I ran my palm along the nearest column one more time. “This is truly ours now,” I whispered.
From somewhere behind me, Austin’s footsteps approached and he hugged me from behind.
I slid the ledger into my coat, tucked Penny’s letter into the inside pocket, and turned to face Austin.
The wind shifted and stitched our breath together in a white ribbon.
Chapter 24
Terms and Conditions
Austin
Iwoke to the sound of men crying out and shouting, radio static crackling, and gunfire. It took me a minute to realize it was just the sounds of my past echoing in my mind. A sound that used to be a part of every night, but had softened over the last several months, though it had never really gone away. They were a reminder of where I’d come from. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and my hands were tacky.
I lay there for a second in the half-light, listening.
The small, ordinary sounds of a home hummed in the background: pipes clinking, wood creaking, the faint thump of cat paws jumping down from a windowsill. It was all a part of what I’d started to call home.
On the nightstand beside the bed sat an envelope Browne had left for me. It was my termination letter, a notice saying I’d completed my mission and was no longer obligated to the security of the asset.
I sat up, a wry laugh escaping. It felt odd and unnatural to call Milly “the asset.” Milly wasn’t an asset. She’d stopped being an asset less than a month into the mission. Her quiet chaos, her attempts at organization, everything she did pulled me into her cute, chaotic orbit.
Her world had wrapped around her yesterday, a world she’d built from what Penny had left. She’d called Everwood and the ranch “home.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and scrubbed a hand over my face. My arm twinged under the bandage when I stretched, a reminder that I’d walked through fire for her, quite literally.
