“‘You are too small… can you really leave your seed in me?’ — the giantess mocked the lone rancher… but that man of the West ended up giving her a lesson no one saw coming.”

That night, when Nami was fast asleep and the fire filled the room with orange shadows, Talia spoke again.

“My daughter needs a place to grow up without hiding,” she said, looking into the flames. “So do I.”

Calder was sitting on the other side, with his elbows on his knees.

—When the weather improves, I can take you somewhere safer. Closer to a town, if you like.

Talia shook her head.

—I don’t want a village.

—So what do you want?

Talia took a while to answer. As if that question weighed more heavily on her than her wounds.

—I want to stop running.

Calder looked up.

She was looking at him in a completely new way. Without mistrust. Without defense. Without the wall she had brought with her when she arrived.

—I want to stay where my daughter can sleep without fear. Where someone protects her without asking for anything in return. Where I can let my guard down without feeling like I’ll be broken for doing so.

Calder swallowed. He felt his chest fill with something dangerous, because hope always was dangerous when one had spent too much time alone.

—Talia…

She approached until she was standing in front of him.

“I’m not speaking to you out of need. Nor out of gratitude. I’m speaking to you because I saw you. And because I saw how you held Nami when winter was about to swallow her whole. I saw the way you covered her, fed her, cared for her. That can’t be faked.”

Then, with fierce honesty, he added:

—You are the first man I don’t feel I have to defend myself against.

The words struck Calder in his most vulnerable spot.

Not because they filled him with pride, but because they reminded him of everything he had lost.

His wife, Martha, had died four years earlier during an outbreak of fever that swept through the area.

The empty house afterwards.

Silence.

Meals for one.