Tomorrow, the lower mountain trail would be passable again.
Tomorrow, she could leave.
Tomorrow, I would return to the silence I'd spent twenty years calling peace.
I swallowed.
"Josephine, there's something you don't understand."
She slowly lowered her hand from my cheek.
Then reached beneath the folds of her pink gown and withdrew an old, carefully preserved envelope.
The paper had yellowed with age.
The corners were worn.
Across the front, in dark brown ink, someone had written my name.
Hiram Walker.
I recognized the handwriting immediately.
My breath stopped.
I'd last seen those delicate, slanting letters twenty years earlier, on a note left beside the bed of the woman I loved before she disappeared from my life forever.
"Where did you get that?" I whispered.
Josephine's eyes filled with tears.
She pressed the envelope into my trembling hand.
"I wasn't lost when you found me, Hiram."
I stared at her.
She took a shaky breath.
"I came into those mountains because I was looking for you."
And suddenly, every quiet morning we'd shared, every storm we'd survived, and every tender word she'd spoken seemed to belong to a story I didn't yet understand.
To explain how I came to stand in that cabin holding a letter from a woman I'd mourned for twenty years, I have to begin four months earlier, when the mountains were buried beneath snow and I still believed I had no reason to live for anyone but myself.
Colorado Territory, January 1876.
Winter had locked the San Juan Mountains beneath a silence so complete that sometimes I could hear the timber settling in the walls of my cabin.
I'd been living there for four months, alone except for an old buckskin gelding named Copper, two stubborn hens, and a mouse that kept stealing cornmeal from a sack near the stove.
The cabin stood in a narrow valley above a pine-covered ravine, nearly eighteen miles from the nearest dependable wagon track. A mountain stream ran behind the property, though most of its surface was frozen, and the surrounding slopes rose toward jagged peaks that seemed determined to keep the outside world away.
I had chosen the place for exactly that reason.
For thirty-eight years, I'd worked cattle trails, ranches, freight routes, and every miserable stretch of country where a man could earn a few dollars with a horse and a strong back. I'd broken wild mustangs in Wyoming, driven longhorns north from Texas, spent three winters repairing fences on a Nebraska ranch, and once survived eleven days in a blizzard with nothing but a horse blanket, a pocketknife, and the stubborn refusal to die.