Epilogue - Part 2 #2
"What is it?" I ask
Holt holds out the folder. The same one, water-warped at the corners, the one Jacob built to survive him.
"Contact called back," Holt says. "Financial crimes division confirmed. She's landing in Great Falls first thing tomorrow."
"That's not what put you on my porch in a whiteout at ten o'clock." I don't take the folder yet. "What else?"
Something careful moves across Holt's face, the look he gets right before he hands me a problem he already knows I'm not going to like.
"McKenna's Great Falls coordinator isn't the top of it.
There's a second name in the file." His eyes flick to Maren, then back to me.
"Someone already inside Montana. Has been for longer than we thought. "
The porch goes quiet except for the wind driving snow hard against the metal roof.
I look at Maren. She looks at me. Six months of choosing this, of choosing her, and none of it has ever once made me want anything different.
"Well," she says. "I guess the evening wasn't done interrupting us yet."
My mouth twitches, faint and real, even now, even with a federal investigator inbound and a name still hiding somewhere close enough to have watched us this whole time.
I take the folder from Holt then. Don't open it yet. Just look at it for a second, jaw tight, already three moves into whatever comes next.
"First light," I say. "Not tonight. Whoever's in this file has been standing close to us for years. They'll keep twelve more hours."
Holt looks at the folder one more time. Then at the two of us, at her bare feet and the fire going behind us, and something that's almost a smile crosses his face and decides not to land.
"First light," he agrees, and goes back into the snow.
I set the folder face-down on the entry table, where it can't watch us, and take her hand back to the couch, to the fire, to the storm doing its worst against the windows and losing.
She's had something tucked away in her knitting bag for two days. I've noticed. I notice everything about her. I've had a good idea what it is since she started working that exact shade of charcoal weeks ago.
"I made you something," she says.
I stop breathing for a second. I already suspect what's coming and I don't want to rush it.
She pulls it out and turns to face me, one foot tucked under her leg, and hands it over without any ceremony, because ceremony isn't what this is. Charcoal cashmere, soft as anything, the exact grey of my own eyes.
I take it slowly. Unfold it slower. I know exactly what this is, have known for a couple of weeks now, the way I know most things about her before she tells me.
I run my thumb over the stitches and think about Dawson's charcoal gloves last Christmas, how he wore them to check fence line the very next morning like they were nothing special.
I think about the shawl Kathleen's had draped over every chair in her house since the winter Maren spent making it. Finn still won't admit the beanie he wears every day from October to April came from his sister's hands, but he wears it anyway, every day, without fail.
And there's the sweater she made for herself, soft moss green, worn thin now from how often she reaches for it.
A whole quiet language, built out of yarn and time, for every person she loves.
I've never once been included in it. Until now.
"Maren."
"It's not much."
"It's everything." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "You made it from your own two hands. Hands that are extremely talented. Thank you."
I look at it a moment longer, something in my chest going softer than it usually allows, and then I look at her instead, and I don't think either of us needs to say anything else about it.
She moves first. She always moves first when she's decided something. She climbs into my lap, knees on either side of my thighs, and takes the scarf back out of my hands.
"Hold still."
She wraps it around my neck herself, settling it like she's imagined doing a hundred times, and I watch her do it with my hands resting at her hips like they belong there, which they do.
"There," she says, smoothing it flat against my chest. "I picked this color because it's exactly you."
"Good." My hand closes over hers where it rests on my chest. "Because I wasn't planning on taking it off."
I go quiet for a moment, my hands still at her hips, something working through me that isn't playful anymore.
"Maren."
"What?"
"I love you." Just that. I say it the way I've said it every day since the morning two families finally sat down at one table, and it has never once stopped costing me something to hand over. That's how I know it's still true.
Something moves across her face, open and soft, the way it does every single time, like the words haven't worn smooth yet. I hope they never do.
"I love you too." Steady. Certain. "Sixteen," she adds, the old confession worn into ritual between us now. “The most stunning thing I'd ever seen in my life. Fourteen years of pretending."
I huff something that isn't quite a laugh, rough and disbelieving, and pull her down until her forehead rests against mine.
"Say it again."
"I love you, Knox."
"Again."
"I love you." She kisses me between each word, a declaration of emotion and honesty. "I love you. I love you."
Tomorrow there's a federal investigator landing in Great Falls and a name in a dead man's folder that has been standing too close to both our families for too long. Tomorrow I hand my brother the war he just cleared his calendar for, and Maren and I go back to work.
Tonight there's a fire crackling, and a storm losing its argument with the windows, and a woman in my flannel with her hand flat over my heart, the pendant I bought her in Missoula at her throat, the future she knotted into every stitch of this scarf around my neck.
My father taught me that everyone is leverage. He was wrong about exactly one person. I'm holding her.
I told him I'd been counting the consequences since the rodeo.
I still am.
I just stopped counting them as costs.
THE END