Rey, just beginning to touch his own temples by then, Diani's hand resting easy and familiar in his what exactly a man had to do to build a life as settled and as good as the one he plainly had. Levi considered the question a good long moment, the same unhurried way he considered most things worth answering honestly and glanced over at Diani before he gave them any kind of answer at all. I got lucky enough once to pull a woman free from under a fallen tree and smart enough after that to listen to every single word she's ever given me since. Diani laughed at that soft and warm, the very same laugh that had first caught somewhere deep in his chest beside a spring three long years and one entirely changed life ago. And neither one of them bothered explaining any further because the travelers, watching the two of them together on that porch, understood the whole of it plainly enough without another single word needing to pass between anyone.
Chief Taji lived long enough to see Harmony Crossing through its first decade, riding down from the canyon most seasons to sit on that same porch and watch his niece run a business that neither settler law nor Apache custom had ever quite imagined a woman doing so plainly and so well. Late in his own life, sitting easy in the shade with a cup of trade coffee going cold in his hand, he confided in Levi that he had worried the day he first sent his men down into that ravine, that a settler's gratitude would prove thin and temporary, the kind that faded the moment the debt felt paid. He was glad, he confided further more than once before he was through. to have been wrong about that particular worry. For as long as he'd lived to watch it proven wrong, Levi never forgot hearing it. He carried the old chief's words the same careful way he'd once carried Diani up out of that ravine gently and like something worth protecting.
Sihi outlived the chief by several more seasons, still walking the Harmony Crossing porch on market mornings, well into her final years, still correcting Levi's clumsy grasp of yucca Cordage every chance she got, still reminding anyone who'd listened that the settlers had finally learned to stop digging for what was already growing plainly on top of the ground. Klose grandchildren grew up running that same porch alongside settler children whose own grandparents had once crossed the street rather than shake Levi's hand. And not one of them thought to wonder why the two peoples traded so easily under that one long roof. Because for them, unlike for the generation before, it had simply always been so.
Sometimes the greatest love stories of the frontier were never born from grand rescues or desperate last stands at all. Sometimes they were born from nothing grander than a man who chose to ride toward a stranger's cry instead of away from it, and a woman brave enough to show him, plainly and without apology, exactly what kind of man he still had it in him to become. Levi liked to sum up the whole of it whenever anyone wondered aloud in fewer words than the story properly deserved that he'd once been pulled toward a sound and ravine he had no good reason to enter and had spent every year since finding new reasons to be glad. He went down into it anyway.