Jonah turned away, blinking hard.
Ruth placed a hand lightly on Clara’s back.
The little girl looked up at her.
“Can we come back next week?”
“Of course.”
“Will the flowers grow?”
“With care.”
Clara nodded solemnly.
“Then we must care for them.”
On the walk home, Jonah fell into step beside Ruth.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For helping Clara speak to her mother.”
Ruth looked at him.
“She has every right to remember Anne.”
“I know. But I don’t think I could have done it today without you.”
She slipped her hand into his.
“You do not have to choose between your past and your present.”
He stopped walking.
Ruth turned back.
“What is it?”
Jonah looked toward the hill. The wind moved through the young leaves of the cottonwood, and the newly planted flowers were small against the dark soil.
“I used to think that loving someone again meant I was closing a door behind me,” he said. “But I think perhaps it means opening another one.”
Ruth smiled gently.
“Yes.”
He drew her into his arms.
“I love you, Ruth Mercer.”
She laughed softly.
“You have said that before.”
“I intend to say it many times.”
“Then I shall have to get used to hearing it.”
He kissed her beneath the pale spring sky.
Clara, already halfway down the hill, turned and shouted, “Are you kissing again?”
Jonah rested his forehead against Ruth’s.
“Apparently, we are.”
Ruth laughed, and the sound carried across the orchard.
By the time summer arrived, the ranch had begun to feel like Ruth’s home in ways she had once feared it never could.
Her books filled the shelf. The blue curtains moved softly in the upstairs window. A small garden grew beside the kitchen, with herbs, lettuce, and flowers planted along the fence. Clara’s rabbit, Clover, had arrived from a neighbor’s farm and proved to be both energetic and determined to escape its hutch.
Jonah had built a writing desk beneath the window, and Ruth often sat there in the evenings, writing letters to an old friend in Boston or recording small observations in a journal.
Sometimes Jonah came upstairs and stood behind her chair, resting his hands on her shoulders as he read over her work.
“You make the ranch sound like a grand adventure,” he said once.
“It is a grand adventure.”
“It is mostly mud, cattle, and broken equipment.”