“You’re enormous.”
“I was smaller at seventeen.”
“How much smaller?”
“Not enough.”
She laughed.
The mountain man smiled.
“Your father tore his hands open.”
“Wouldn’t stop.”
“Later, when I thanked him, he told me something.”
“What?”
The mountain man looked toward her.
“If his daughter ever came west alone, I was to make sure the mountains treated her better than men did.”
The woman went very still.
“He said that?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Years later.”
“Last time I saw him.”
She swallowed.
“My father knew my husband.”
The mountain man’s expression tightened.
“He knew of him.”
“Did he dislike him?”
“Yes.”
The answer came too fast.
She almost laughed.
“So did I eventually.”
The mountain man looked toward her.
That was the first time she had admitted it aloud.
She continued quietly:
“He wasn’t always cruel.”
“No one is.”
She looked surprised.
Most people who heard even a fraction of the truth wanted to turn her dead husband into a monster.
The mountain man did not.
That somehow honored her experience more.
She said:
“He could be charming.”
“Generous.”
“Then he would say one thing.”
“One little thing.”
“About my dress.”
“Or how much I ate.”
“Or how other men must be grateful he married me.”
The mountain man’s jaw tightened.
She noticed.
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“Look like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you want to hit a dead man.”
He looked away.
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“Only a little.”
She almost smiled.
Then her expression softened.
“My father probably saw more than I admitted.”
“Fathers do.”
“Did yours?”
The mountain man’s face changed.
“He saw enough.”
“What happened to him?”
“Fever.”
“When?”
“Twelve years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
He nodded.
The woman looked around the cabin.
“You stayed here alone all that time?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He shrugged.
“It was home.”
“That’s not the whole answer.”
“No.”
She waited.
He continued packing.
Then:
“Town never fit.”
Something about the sentence hurt her.
She understood too well.
“What didn’t fit?”
He looked toward her.
“Me.”
She stared at his enormous body.
Then laughed softly.
“What?”
He frowned.
“You tell me not to apologize for being too big in a room, and now you’re telling me you don’t fit in town.”
His mouth opened.
She continued:
“Cabin’s twenty by twenty.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
She smiled.
“Unless you’re twenty-one feet wide, you fit fine.”
For one stunned second, he simply stared.
Then the mountain man laughed.
Not a polite chuckle.