By the end of that night, there was not a slice of cobbler left on the plate, and there were three separate women asking Emiline quite sincerely for her recipe. Winter came hard and early that year, the way it does in high country, burying the passes and slowing the whole valley down to the pace of wood smoke and lamplight. It was during those long, quiet months snowed in together at Cutter's Rest, that Emiline began to understand something about Judge Calhoun that explained the careful gentleness underneath his gruff exterior. He had lost his wife Rosalie to a fever 11 years back, not so different from the fever that had taken the use of Emiline's legs, and he had buried along with her a habit of hoping for anything at all. I stopped expecting good things a long while ago, he confessed one night by the fire, his voice low, almost surprised at his own honesty.
Seems safer that way. man doesn't get his heart broke twice if he doesn't let it open in the first place. Emiline understood that kind of guarding better than most people alive. She had built the very same wall brick by careful brick every time her family reminded her she was less than whole. "And now?" she asked quietly.
He didn't answer right away. He only looked at her across the firelight. really looked the way almost nobody had looked at her since she was 6 years old and whole in her family's eyes. Now, he said finally, I find myself hoping again. Didn't ask for it. Didn't want it if I'm honest.
But there it is. Emiline felt something in her chest loosen that had been clenched tight for 13 years. Spring came slow into the valley, the way it always does at that altitude, and with it came a letter that Jeb carried up from town with an odd look on his face, addressed to Emiline in handwriting she recognized instantly, and had hoped never to see again. It was from her father. Word had apparently traveled even that far that the Vaughn name was being spoken of kindly again in Bitterroot Gap, on account of a certain remarkable young woman living up at Cutter's Rest, and her father, ever a man who measured worth in reputation and reputation alone, had decided perhaps it was time to reclaim his daughter now that she had become, in his words, a credit rather than a burden.
Amalign read the letter twice at the kitchen table, her jaw tightening with every line, and then she folded it once precisely and set it down. "What will you do?" judge asked, watching her carefully from across the room. "He wants me back," Emiline said. "Now that I'm convenient again."
There was a version of this story where she might have gone, where old wounds and old longing for a father's approval might have pulled her back down that mountain despite everything. Emiline sat with that thought a long moment, turning it over the way she'd turned over every hard thing in her life. Then she looked up at Judge Calhoun, at Jeb, pretending very hard not to listen from the doorway, at Duke, asleep with his head against her wheel, exactly where he'd claimed his post that first night. And she felt the answer arrive in her chest, with a certainty she had never once felt about anything before. "I already have a family," she said.
"One that chose me. I'm not leaving it for one that only remembered me once I stopped being inconvenient. Her father did not accept that answer. Men of his kind rarely accept an answer that arrives by post. He came himself in June, him and her brother both, off the Thursday stage, and they took two rooms at the hotel in Bitterroot Gap, and sent word up the mountain that Miss Vaughn was to present herself in town.
Emiline read the note twice, the way she read most things, and then she said, "Hitch the wagon." They came down on a Saturday because Emiline chose Saturday and anybody who has ever lived in a small town will understand exactly why. Saturday was when the whole valley came in. Saturday was when the boardwalk in front of the hotel had 30 people standing on it. Her father was waiting under the hotel awning in a good gray coat and he had prepared.
She could see it in his face, an expression of forgiveness. "Emalign," he said. "You've made your point. Your mother is unwell, and it's time to stop this." "Hello, father."
There's a carriage engaged for Tuesday. I'll thank you to be ready. He glanced at Judge Calhoun the way a man glances at a hired driver. and I'll settle whatever this man is owed for keeping you." Emiline let that stand in the air a moment in front of Anoria Styles on her own store step and the preacher and Hollis Reed and three women from the sewing circle and half the county besides. "Say it out loud," Emiline said, her father's jaw tightened.
"Say what out loud?" what you did at the ford. Her voice did not rise. It had never needed to. Say it here in front of these people the way you did it in front of nobody.
You put me down at the water's edge on the 10th of April with one trunk and no horse, and you crossed over, and you drove away west, and you did not look back. My brother held the reigns of the second wagon. My mother fixed her gloves. Somebody on the boardwalk made a sound. That is not the circumstances were.