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“Good morning, Beck.”

“You too? Two in one year?” He crosses the shop and claps me on the shoulder hard enough to move a lesser man. “Grandma always said they come in clusters. I thought she was just being romantic.”

“Are you here for coffee,” I ask, “or commentary?”

“Both. Big order, Jess. I’m heading up to the Hollow Ridge parcel this afternoon.” He turns back to us. “Clearing deadfall off the old logging road past the Glacier Lake trailhead. Two weeks, maybe three. No cell signal, no neighbors. It’s going to be great.”

Jess starts filling a thermos. “You heard about the ice storm? They’re saying it will come over the pass Friday.”

“I’ve got the cabin. It’s stocked.” Beck shrugs.

He takes his thermos, says goodbye to the women with considerably less swagger than he arrived with, and leaves. Through the window I watch him climb into his truck and sit there for a moment with his hands on the wheel, frowning at nothing, before he pulls out toward the mountains.

At the table, Nina laughs at something Mara says. The comb catches the light in her hair.

I drink my coffee and say nothing at all.

Chapter Seven

nina

It is officially tomorrow, which means Silas owes me a conversation about the 1847 trust.

I corner him in the study after lunch with the folder and a legal pad full of arithmetic. He listens to me lay it out without interrupting: the original trust, the annual disbursement written into it, and the fact that the ledgers show the money leaving the operating account every single year as far back as the ledgers go and arriving nowhere I can find.

“So either you’ve been embezzling from yourself for a hundred and eighty years,” I say, “or there’s an account I don’t know about.”

He opens a drawer, takes out a slim leather portfolio, and slides it across the desk.

It’s a single sub-account. Separate custodian. Compounding quietly since before the Civil War. The clause that funds it is two sentences long, written in a looping hand that isn’t his. I read it twice.

An annual provision, held in trust, for the mate of any heir of this house, to be hers outright upon the bond.

I look at the balance. I look at it again. My accountant brain, which has remained functional through gold scales and knotting and honey, quietly sits down on the floor.

“Your parents set this up. Years before you were born.”

“My mother.” He says it with great care. “She insisted. My father thought it sentimental. She told him when a true mate arrived for any child of theirs, she would not have that woman walk into this house with nothing of her own.”

“And you just… kept funding it?”

“It was in the trust. My mother required an annual transfer from the family holdings, regardless of whether I ever found a mate. The independent trustee invested each contribution and kept the account separate from the estate.”

“And when the mate arrives?”

“Once the trustee verifies the bond, the funds are distributed outright to her. Not to me. Not to the estate. No conditions requiring her to remain here.”

I stare at him. Even his mother had insisted the woman who joined this family have a choice.

“Silas, that is nearly a hundred and eighty years of contributions and investment returns.”

“I am aware of how compound interest works.”

“You didn’t think you’d ever need it?”

He’s quiet for a moment. “No,” he says. “I did not.”

I close the portfolio. My throat is tight. Then I clear it, because there is a bigger number sitting in this house that I have not been allowed to look at.