Homespun Bride

between them suddenly felt as wide as the sky and about as impossible to fly across.
    “You hurt for him.”
    Her sympathy touched him. It did more than that, her sweet face was marked with understanding, and it reassured him. “There’s no way to measure how hard we all took this. He’s smart and talented and he has a good heart.”
    “Sort of like his older brother?”
    Now, that was just what he needed to hear. Snow brushed his cheek like grace, changing his heart, changing his life. Thad took a shaky breath. “Finn’s got our pa’s weakness for liquor.”
    “And it’s hard for him to resist?” When he didn’t answer, she nodded once, as if she understood why without words. “You want him to be stronger than that.”
    “Yes. That’s right.”
    “I’ve felt that way about a family member.” Her forehead pinched. “My parents. I am sorry for what they did to you. My father was a man who could be very persuasive. What did he say to you?”
    “That you wouldn’t be happy living a simple life with me.”
    “And you believed him?”
    Her voice, her face, her eyes vibrated with pain. A pain he felt like a dagger sink into his heart. What else could he do but to tell the truth. “I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t let myself.”
    “You left me because my father threatened to demand payment on your mortgage, didn’t he?”
    Thad bit his lip. Hadn’t the truth hurt her enough? “You don’t have to answer. I know it’s true.” She tucked the robe around her more tightly, as if unable to say more. She was hurting, clearly she was hurting.
    “It’s tough when the people you love aren’t the way you want them to be.” The cold scorched his face like fiery ice, and yet it was warmer than the pain that settled in him. He was no longer too numb to feel it. Because of her.
    “And so you know, my father was wrong,” she said. “All I wanted then, all I needed then, was you.”
    Her words were like coming home. Like Christmas morning and happy New Year and every birthday rolled into one. The beautiful world was all around them, so he began to describe it to her. “The mountains, their faces are hidden in the clouds. The sky is a darker shade of white guarding over the white prairie. The snow is quiet today. Nothing sparkling or glistening. Just a still silent white.”
    A small smile curved her rosebud lips.
    They rode on in silence, gliding over the rise and draw of the rugged plains. They listened to snow whisper and tap, and shared a quiet that felt companionable. Peaceful.
    Meant to be.
    The sleigh was slowing, and before she could ask why, she heard the waterfall. Angel Falls. She loved the cascading music of the charging water. Even before she lost her sight, it was one of her most favorite sounds. Maybe because she’d built so many dreams around it. It was painfully ironic that she had inherited this property from her father, one of the last investments he had acquired before his death.
    “That sounded sad.” Thad drew the horse to a stop. She tilted her head, listening carefully but there was only the snort of the horse, the water falling and the whirl of snow against the dash of the sleigh. “What sounds sad?”
    “You. You sighed.”
    “Did I?” She wasn’t aware of it. Then again, it was hard to feel anything. The tangled ball of emotion had returned and expanded like regret in her soul. “Is the water gray like the clouds? Or green from the mountain snowmelt?”
    “Green as moss.”
    She closed her eyes, searching for a visual memory of the falls in winter, but the one that came to her was vivid with color and cheerful wildflowers polka-dotting rich green fields.
    “The snowfall is as gray as the clouds,” Thad told her. “The snow is white, but it’s pure white and gray shadows and a thousand shades between.”
    She couldn’t see it. She couldn’t let herself. She struggled to dim the memory in her mind’s eye of rainbows the sun made on crystal blue water. And there, on the rise where the meadow met the hills, she used to envision a log house with wide windows glinting in the sunshine and a porch to sit and watch the falls in the evening’s light.
    A dream. That’s what she remembered, and the loss of it thrummed along the broken strings of her heart. The regret swelling in her soul seemed to block out even those colors and that light.
    The wind whirring in her ears stilled, as the horse drew the sleigh to a stop.
    Thad leaned closer. “We have a lot of memories