Even in the middle of the storm. It will be hard work, Jonah said. The roof needs shingling. The floor is rotted. The trail is washed out.
I am not afraid of work, Millie said. Jonah smiled. It was a rare open thing that crinkled the corners of his eyes. I know, he said. They packed the horses.
They bought supplies. Enough for a season. Paid for with the remaining money from Jonah's trapping. They rode out of town on the main street. They did not hide in the alleys.
They rode with their heads up. The climb back to the ridge was a reclamation. The snow had melted enough to reveal the earth, black, rich, and smelling of pine needles and thaw. The creek was roaring, alive, and violent. When they reached the cabin, it looked small and battered.
The door was hanging off one hinge where the deputies had kicked it. The windows were dark. It looked like a ruin, but to Jonah and Millie, it looked like a castle. They started that very afternoon. Jonah fixed the hinge.
Millie swept the broken glass and the debris from the floor. They built a fire in the stove, and the smell of wood smoke, their smoke, claimed the space again. The spring became a season of building. The silver claim was legally theirs now. Filed with the federal court, but they didn't rush to mine it.
They had enough to live. They focused on the home. Jonah felled cedar trees and split shakes for the roof. He worked with his shirt off in the warming sun, his muscles moving with the rhythm of the axe. Millie watched him sometimes, pausing in her gardening to admire the man who had stood by her.
She planted a garden in the patch of sunlight near the cliff wall. Potatoes, carrots, peas. She began to sew again. Not for the shopkeepers who sneered, but for herself. She made curtains for the windows.
She made a new shirt for Jonah. Their romance grew into a daily lived intimacy. It wasn't the desperate, frantic clinging of the blizzard. It was quieter. It was Jonah bringing her a cup of coffee in the morning before she asked.
It was Millie rubbing liniment into his scarred shoulder after a long day of chopping wood. It was the laughter that surprised them both. Millie laughing when Jonah tried to explain the difference between a spruce and a fir and got tangled in his own words. Jonah chuckling when Millie chased a marmot out of her garden with a broom, swearing in French. Desire remained intense, but it was rooted in trust now.
At night, when the wind howled around the eaves, they reached for each other not to escape fear, but to affirm life. Their lovemaking was slow and deep, a language of gratitude and possession. They belonged to each other, and that belonging made them invulnerable. Jonah started trading his pelts again. He didn't go to the big mercantile.