“You Cook and Stay Out of My Way,” the Mountain Trapper Said — Until Her Hidden Scars Changed Eve…

Chapter 12

Summer came, and with it a letter.

It was brought up by a rider from Deer Gap, a boy from the livery who came with a load of supplies and a folded envelope addressed in a precise, educated hand to Mr. Gideon Vane, North Ridge, care of Tully Breck’s Mercantile.

Gideon read it standing on the porch, and then he read it again, and then he folded it and put it in his pocket and did not mention it.

But Nora had learned to read him the way he read the weather. She waited until supper, and then she said, “The letter. It’s from Preston, isn’t it.”

Gideon set down his fork. “From a lawyer in Cincinnati. Writing on behalf of the estate.”

“Tell me.”

“It seems Mr. Hale is not entirely satisfied with the story he’s been given. He’s made inquiries. He believes his brother’s widow may still be alive, and he is prepared to offer a more substantial consideration to anyone who can produce proof one way or the other.”

Nora was quiet for a moment. “He’s testing. He doesn’t believe I’m dead. He’ll hire someone better.”

“Maybe.” Gideon picked up his fork. “Or maybe he’s an old man who has spent two years and a good deal of money chasing a woman who got away from him, and he’s starting to find that the chase costs more than the winning ever would.”

“You don’t know him like I do. He doesn’t give up. He doesn’t—”

“Nora.” He waited until she looked at him. “I’m not afraid of Preston Hale. I’ve been afraid of things that could actually hurt me — storms, starvation, a man with a knife in the dark. A lawyer in Cincinnati is not one of them. And neither are you.”

She opened her mouth to argue. He could see her gathering the arguments — the money, the influence, the patience, the way men like that always won — and he could see her stop, because she had been living in this house long enough now to know that when Gideon Vane said a thing, he meant it, and he had never once lied to her about anything that mattered.

“He’ll try again,” she said finally.

“Let him.” Gideon picked up his fork. “We’ll be here.”

They were.

The letter was the last they heard from Preston Hale for a long time. Whether he found a different story to tell himself, or whether the chase simply stopped being worth the cost, Nora never knew. She did not ask. She had stopped needing the story to end the way anyone else wanted it to end. She was the one writing it now.

That autumn, the first one she had ever spent on the mountain, she went with Gideon to check the high lines.

It was her idea. She said it plain one morning, over breakfast: that she had been in his house for ten months, and he had been out on those lines in every kind of weather, and it seemed to her that a person ought to understand the country she was going to live on. He had looked at her a long moment, and then he had said, “You’ll need boots that fit,” and that afternoon he had taken her down to Deer Gap and bought her a pair.

She learned the high country that fall the way she had learned everything else in her life — quietly, thoroughly, by paying attention. She learned to read a set. She learned where the deer yarded and where the beaver ran. She learned the sound the mountain made when the weather was turning, and she learned that Gideon Vane, who said almost nothing, said more with his silences than most men said with their mouths.

She learned to shoot again, properly, right-handed.

It took months. The bones that had been broken and never healed straight ached in the cold, and her grip failed her when she least expected it, and there were days when she set the rifle down and stood in the yard with her hand pressed against her apron and her eyes closed, and said nothing, and went back inside.

Gideon never pushed. He never told her she had to. He set up the targets, and he cleaned the rifle, and when she came out to try again he was there, and when she did not come out he was there too, in the other room, saying nothing, making sure she knew the door was open.

And one afternoon in late October, when the aspens had gone gold and the light lay long and low across the meadow, Nora Hale lifted the rifle with her right hand — the hand that had been broken, the hand with the scars, the hand she had hidden for so long she had forgotten it could do anything but hurt — and she worked the lever and she fired, and she hit the can she had been aiming at, square and clean, and it went spinning end over end down the meadow.

She stood there a moment, the rifle still at her shoulder, the echo rolling off the ridge.

Behind her, Gideon Vane said, “That’s a decent shot.”

She lowered the rifle. She turned to look at him. The sun was in her eyes and she could not read his face, but she did not need to. She knew what he looked like when he was pleased. She had learned.

“You taught me,” she said.

“I showed you. You did the work.”

She stood there with the rifle in her hands and the gold light all around her, and she felt something give way inside her — something that had been knotted so long and so tight she had forgotten it was there, and now it was gone, and she was lighter than she had been in her whole adult life.