She withdrew an old leather glove.
It was dark brown, cracked along the knuckles, and stiff with age. Several stitches had come loose around the wrist, and one side bore a distinctive triangular patch of lighter leather.
The rancher froze.
His eyes widened.
He stared at the glove as though she had placed a ghost between them.
“Where did you get that?”
Her fingers trembled.
“I've kept it for four winters.”
He took one step toward her.
His voice became barely audible.
“That's impossible.”
She held it out.
He recognized the patch immediately.
He had sewn it himself while sitting beside a campfire during the coldest winter of his life.
The glove had disappeared the night he nearly died on the northern mountain pass.
He remembered the snow.
The broken ice.
The fever.
And fragments of a voice calling him back whenever he slipped into darkness.
For years, he had believed the woman who saved him was little more than a half-remembered dream.
Now that glove lay in front of him.
He slowly lifted his eyes.
“It was you?”
Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Yes.”
He stared.
“You were there?”
She nodded.
“The night you came through the storm. You were barely standing.”
His breathing changed.
He remembered stumbling through waist-deep snow after losing his way near the ridge.
He remembered one glove tearing away when he fell into a frozen stream.
He remembered his injured hand becoming numb.
Then a door.
Firelight.
A woman's voice.
And the sensation of someone wrapping warm cloth around his freezing fingers.
He had never seen her face clearly.
The fever had taken everything else.
“You kept me alive,” he whispered.
She lowered her eyes.
“I did what anyone should have done.”
He shook his head.
“No.”
His voice broke.
“No, you did more than that.”
She tried to smile.
“You were terribly stubborn, even then.”
He stared at her.
For four years, he had carried an unanswered question.
Who had saved him?
Who had sat beside him during those nights?
Who had fed him broth and kept the fire alive when he could barely open his eyes?
He had searched for the shelter after recovering, but an avalanche had destroyed part of the northern trail before he could locate it.
Eventually, he convinced himself that the details were hopelessly confused by fever.
Now the answer stood before him.
A beautiful, enormous woman in a burgundy dress, her cheeks wet with tears, holding an old leather glove.
He reached for it.