Grief doesn't work that way, and I'd think less of you if you tried pretending otherwise. There's room in a heart for more than one kind of love, Wade Callaway. Doesn't dishonor the first to make space for something new. "That wisdom, or you just talking again to hear yourself?" "Both," she said, echoing her father's own words back at him from that very first morning.
And Wade laughed, actually laughed, standing in a small fenced graveyard that had haunted him for five straight years, and found the sound didn't feel like betrayal at all. It felt for the first time since the morning he found that blue shawl waving at him from a fence post, like healing finally catching up to grief instead of hiding from it. They rode back toward the spring as the sun dropped low. The desert doing what it always did at that hour, turning every hard edge soft and gold for just a handful of forgiving minutes. Waterheart, Autumn Sky said, testing the name again, the way she seemed to enjoy doing every so often, like checking a knot still held.
Suits you a great deal better now than it did the night my father gave it to you. How's that? That night, you were a man still carrying a wound he hadn't looked at properly. Tonight you're something closer to whole. She glanced over at him.
Fire like gold in the last of the sun. Took you long enough. Man's got to pace himself. Wouldn't want you getting bored of me too quick. Small chance of that, she said.
And there was a promise in it this time that neither one of them felt any particular need to hide from the other or from her father or from anybody sitting close enough by the fire to notice. That evening, back at camp, Grey Talon called, "Wade aside, away from the celebration still winding down around them." "You have given my people water," the chief said. "Given them justice for a wrong nobody else was willing to chase down, and you have given my daughter something." I confess I did not expect any man to earn from her so completely.
Wasn't trying to earn anything, chief. Just tried to do right best I knew how. One day at a time. That, Grey Talon said, is precisely why it worked. He studied Wade a long moment, something almost like warmth, finally settling into a face that had spent most of two months guarded and careful.
My people have a saying. A man is not measured by the water he is given. He is measured by the water he chooses to share. Reckon I understand that better now than I did two months back. Reckon you do?
Grey Talon allowed himself for the first time since Wade had met him something close to a genuine smile. "Welcome home, Waterheart. Properly this time. Not as a debt repaid—as family." Autumn Sky found him later sitting by the water's edge inside the cavern.