It was a quieter ache, a question of betrayal. He had loved his wife, and now he was building a new life, a new love on the very land they were meant to share. He felt one bright afternoon in early summer, that he could not move forward until he had reconciled the two. He took Tyen's hand. He said nothing, just letter from the cabin, past the corral and up the small pine-covered ridge that overlooked their valley.
The grave was there beneath the largest pinon. The wooden cross he had carved was gray and weathered. The mound of stones was undisturbed. Tyen stopped when she saw it. She knew what it was.
Her people did not mark their dead this way, but she understood the meaning of a quiet, separate place. Daniel stood before it, his hat in his hands. This was This is Elara's grave, my wife. He spoke, his voice low, telling her about the woman who had been Comanche and Irish, who had loved this high, lonely country. He told her about the birth, about the long, terrible night, about the snow falling outside as he held his wife's cold hand and listened to the silence of the child who had never cried.
I buried them here, he finished, his voice rough. Together. It was 5 years ago. Tyen listened, her gaze moving from his face to the wooden cross. She saw the story, not in his words, but in the lines around his eyes, in the permanent set of his shoulders.
She understood finally the source of the profound sadness he carried. The answer to her long ago question. "Why does your heart sleep alone?" It had not been alone. It had been buried here.
She did not speak. She stepped past him to the grave from a small leather pouch at her belt. She pulled a necklace. It was not a grand thing. It was a single smooth white shell intricately carved with small crossing lines strung on a simple leather thong.
It was one of the few possessions she had kept, a relic from a life he could not imagine. She bent and laid the shell necklace on the mound of stones. Carefully, so it rested just beneath the carved name. She stood and faced him. She put her small, warm hand on his chest.
"She was first," Tyen said, her voice soft. "She was sad. She let me have you now." Daniel looked from the white shell on the dark stones to Tyen's clear, steady eyes. He had expected her to be jealous or confused.
He had not expected this. A simple profound acceptance, a blessing. He felt a weight he had carried for 5 years, a weight of fidelity to a ghost. Suddenly, lift. He pulled her to him, burying his face in her hair.
And for the first time, he felt not like a man betraying a memory, but a man permitted to live again. The summer deepened, the heat settled in the valley. The corn they had planted was shoulder high. Their intimacy was a simple, unspoken fact, a rhythm as natural as the passing of the days. They woke together, they worked together, they slept together.
He began to notice small changes. Tyen, who had a wolf's appetite for jerky and smoked meat, suddenly turned from it. One morning, the smell of bacon frying made her gag and run from the cabin. She was tired, more so than the work warranted. He would find her asleep in the shade of the porch in the middle of the afternoon.