“I Heard You Want a Wife — We Are Perfect for You.” Identical Chinese Twins Said to the Lone Rancher

Chapter 5

Spring came slowly, reluctantly, as if the winter did not want to let go. Icicles dripped from the eaves in a steady rhythm, like a clock counting down to something I was not ready for. Patches of brown earth appeared in the valley, spreading like a stain, and the creek swelled with runoff, its voice returning after months of silence.

The time for departure was drawing near.

I became moody. I spent longer hours on the range, riding fences that did not need fixing, hunting game we did not need. I was preparing myself for the return to silence, for the moment when the cabin would go quiet again and I would be left alone with my ghosts. I told myself it was for the best. What kind of life could I offer them here? Hard work, isolation, the memory of a dead wife that hung over every corner of every room. They deserved better—a life in a city with people of their own kind, with comforts I could not provide, with futures I could not imagine.

One evening, I came back to the cabin late. The sun had already set. The air was crisp with the approaching spring, carrying the smell of wet earth and pine. I walked in expecting to see them packing, or perhaps asking when I could take them to the nearest train depot.

Instead, the cabin was warm, filled with the smell of roasting venison and something else—something sweet, like honey and wild berries. Mai and Leanne were standing by the table, which was set for three. They had found an old tablecloth I had forgotten I owned—one Annabelle had used on Sundays, embroidered with flowers she had never seen growing in Wyoming, peonies and chrysanthemums that she had stitched from memory. They had placed a jar of pine sprigs in the center, with tiny white flowers woven through them.

I stopped at the door, knocking the mud from my boots. “What’s all this?”

“Dinner,” they said in unison.

“Sit.”

I washed my hands in the basin. I sat.

We ate in silence, but the air was charged with unspoken words, heavy with something that pressed against my chest. I pushed my food around my plate, my appetite gone.

“Snow’s clearing,” I said finally. The words tasted like ash in my mouth. “Pass should be open in a day or two. I can saddle Boulder up. Take you down to Laramie. Put you on a train to wherever you want to go. San Francisco, maybe. Or back east, if you have family there.”

Mai and Leanne stopped eating. They placed their forks down with a deliberate, synchronized click that sounded louder than a gunshot in the quiet room.

“Is that what you want, Garrett?” Mai asked. “To send us away?”

I looked up, my jaw tight. “Ain’t about what I want. It’s about what’s right. This ain’t no life for women like you. Stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with a grumpy old rancher who talks to his horse. You got your whole lives ahead of you. No debts now. You’re free.”

“Free,” Leanne repeated, testing the word.

They stood up and walked around the table. They moved with a grace that made the rough cabin floor seem like a ballroom, stopping on either side of my chair.

“We have listened to you, Garrett,” Mai said softly. “When you think we are asleep, you talk to the fire. You tell it about the missing buttons on your shirts. You tell it about the fence posts that need replacing. You tell it that the silence is too loud.”

“You complain that the town’s people look at you with pity,” Leanne added. “You told the fire that Mrs. Gable, the baker’s wife, tried to set you up with her niece. You told the fire that her niece was twenty-two years old and that you were too old for her. And then you told the fire that you were not too old—you were too broken.”

My face heated. “I just talk to hear myself think. Don’t mean nothing by it.”

They leaned in closer, their hands resting on my shoulders, their warmth seeping through the fabric of my shirt. The scent of them—soap, wood smoke, and the sage they cooked with—filled my senses.

“Last week, when you went to town for supplies,” Leanne continued, “you came back angry. You told Boulder—the horse—that Mrs. Gable’s niece kept smiling at you. You said: *They all think I need a wife. But they don’t know me.*”

Mai gently turned my head to face her. Leanne’s hand stayed on my other shoulder.

“You need help here, Garrett,” Mai said. “You work too hard. Your cooking is terrible. Your house needs a woman’s hand.”

“Not just the house,” Leanne said. She touched my chest, right over my heart, her palm flat against the fabric. “Your heart is lonely.”

I swallowed hard, unable to look away from their gaze.

“I manage,” I choked out.

They smiled.

A slow, confident curve of their lips that made my breath catch in my throat. They leaned down, their faces inches from mine, their voices dropping to a whisper that carried more weight than any shout.

“We heard you want a wife,” Mai said, her eyes locking onto mine.

Leanne finished the thought. “We are perfect for you.”

The words hung in the air. Bold. Undeniable.

I stared at them, stunned. I looked from one face to the other, searching for a joke, a trick, a moment when they would laugh and tell me they were teasing. I found only sincerity, and a strength that matched my own, and something else—something that looked a lot like hope.

“Mai. Leanne.” I stammered. “I’m a widower. I’m older than you. I ain’t rich. I got nothing but this land and a lot of hard work and a heart that’s been dead for five years.”

“We do not want rich,” Leanne said firmly. “We want safe.”

“We want kind,” Mai added. “We want a man who rides into a blizzard to save strangers. A man who holds the hands of dying women and talks to them through the night because he cannot bear to let them go alone.”

“We want a home where we are not sold like livestock. Where we choose to stay because we want to, not because we have to.”

They each took one of my rough hands in theirs.

“We choose this,” they said together. “We choose you.”

I felt the walls I had built around my heart crumbling, stone by stone, the mortar of years dissolving in the warmth of their touch. I stood up slowly, towering over them, yet feeling like they were the ones holding me up.

“You really mean that? You’d both stay here with me?”

“We are not going anywhere, Garrett Thorne,” Mai said.

“Unless you throw us out in the snow again,” Leanne added, a glimmer in her eye.

A laugh bubbled up in my chest—a sound I had not heard in years. Rusty. Deep. Unfamiliar. It felt like a muscle waking up after being frozen.

“Not a chance,” I said. “You’d freeze before you got to the gate.”

I reached out. My hands hesitated for a moment before cupping their faces. Their skin was soft, warm, a stark contrast to my calloused palms.

I leaned down and kissed Mai.

Then Leanne.

The first kiss was tentative—a question asked and heard. The second was an answer.

And when they kissed me back, I felt something I had not felt in five years: the certainty that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.