A Mountain Man Sought a Wife Who Could Cook—What She Gave Him Was Beyond Priceless

Chapter 8

The door creaked open behind them. A small voice, thick with sleep.

“Clara?”

Grace stood in the doorway, her rag doll dangling by its one arm, her eyes half-closed. “I had a bad dream.”

Clara let go of Elias’s hand. She knelt down — her knees protesting, the cold biting through her dress — and opened her arms.

“Come here, sugar.”

The little girl crossed the porch and climbed into Clara’s lap. Clara wrapped her shawl around them both.

“You warm enough?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Elias watched them — his youngest daughter curled against the woman he had ordered out of a catalog, the woman who had turned out to be more than he had ever known how to ask for.

“You staying?” Grace murmured against Clara’s shoulder.

“Always said I would, sugar.”

“Forever?”

Clara looked up. She saw Elias standing over them, his hand still half-extended from where she had let it go, a question in his eyes that matched his daughter’s.

She looked out at the mountains, black against the stars, going on forever.

Then she looked down at the child in her arms, at the small hand gripping her sleeve, at the face of a girl who had learned that everybody leaves — and was learning, slowly, that not everybody does.

“Forever sounds about right,” Clara said.

She settled back against the porch rail. Elias sat down beside her. The fire glowed through the cabin window. The stars wheeled overhead. And Clara Bennett — who had crossed three states carrying a dead man’s ledgers and a living woman’s hope — let herself, for the first time in her life, believe she had found the place where she belonged.

Inside the cabin, the trunk sat empty in the corner, its lid open, its purpose fulfilled. The weight she had carried was weight no more.

The wind moved through the pines.

The fire burned on.

And nobody in that house went hungry that night.

**THE END**