Wade had never much cared for comfortable thoughts, but this one sat heavier than most. Night came down cold and clear, the way desert nights always did. stars close enough touch. The kind of sky that made a man feel very small and very alone, even when, especially when he wasn't actually alone at all. Wade sat outside his own cabin. 20 armed strangers ringed patiently around him in the dark, and turned the last five years over in his mind like a stone.
He simply couldn't stop picking back up, no matter how many times it cut him. He'd built a whole life, brick by brick, on one single belief. Apaches killed Sarah. That was the story he'd told himself every single morning since. The story that let him hate an entire people instead of sitting alone with a grief too enormous and too unanswerable to survive any other way.
Except Except now there was a fragment of Army-issue rifle housing tucked inside a young Apache warrior's shirt found not 10 feet from the very spot where Wade had rescued a chief's own daughter and Wade Callaway lying awake under a sky crowded with more stars than he had answers for was starting to understand something that frightened him a great deal. More than 200 armed men camped in his own front yard ever could. What if he had spent five long years hating the wrong people entirely? What if the truth had been standing somewhere else this whole time, patient, unhurried, exactly like the desert itself, waiting for him to finally stop running far enough and long enough to turn around and actually look at it. He didn't sleep.
Not really, not in any way that counted. Somewhere near midnight, he went back inside to check on Autumn Sky again. Found her fever holding steady at last. her breathing even and unlabored for the first time since he'd carried her through that door. He sat by the cot anyway because sitting there in the quiet was better than sitting alone with his own thoughts and because he admitted this to himself slowly, reluctantly the way a man admits any truth he's spent years working hard to avoid because some small stubborn traitorous part of him simply did not want to leave her side. Three days.
Three days to prove his own heart was true to a man who had every last right in the world not to believe a single word out of his mouth. Three days and somewhere out past the edge of everything. Wade Callaway thought he understood about his own life. A 5-year-old story about who had killed his wife was already coming apart at every seam he'd sewn it he shut with. Wade looked at the sleeping woman on his cot Apache, a chief's daughter, a stranger he'd known for less than two full days, and felt something shift inside his chest that he hadn't felt once.