For the first time, Evangeline admitted, to herself at least, that she wished Big John would never come back. Indeed, she wished there wasn’t a Big John at all, just her and Scully and Abigail. If only it had been Scully who’d sent for her, Scully who’d wanted her for a wife.

Stop it, she scolded herself fiercely. She was spoken for, and Scully was Big John’s partner. Even if he did care for her, and said so right out, he would have been betraying a friend, and she couldn’t have respected him or herself in such circumstances. And without respect, love was impossible.

“Those are fine fish,” she said, speaking of the trout, and immediately felt stupid. It was just that she had to break the silence, she couldn’t bear it, and nothing else came to mind. Nothing she could rightly say, anyway.

Scully thanked her distractedly then got up and went outside, leaving his coat and the rifle behind. When he returned, a few minutes later, he didn’t offer an explanation for his abrupt departure, and Evangeline didn’t ask for one. She was already washing the dishes, so he dragged his chair over in front of the fire, lifted Abigail onto his lap, and began to tell her about Pegasus, the horse with wings.

She listened raptly, face upturned and awash in adoration and firelight, the kitten cuddled, purring, in her arms. It broke Evangeline’s heart to see her daughter lean against Scully’s chest, toward the end of the story, and fall asleep.

Evangeline came and collected the child then, got her teeth brushed and her face washed, and tucked her into the big bed, with Hortense in a ball on the pillow beside her. When she turned back toward the main part of the cabin, she caught Scully watching her. He looked away quickly, but not quickly enough.

“Her father used to tell her stories,” Evangeline said, drawing up a chair of her own. She was careful to keep a judicious distance, though a part of her wanted to sit in Scully’s lap in much the same way Abigail had.

“I know,” he answered, gazing into the fire again. “She told me the other day, when we were doing chores together.”

“Did you ever have a wife, Scully? Children?” She didn’t know what caused her to ask such personal questions, could have bitten her tongue out for revealing that she’d been wondering about him.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “There was a woman once—a girl really. We were planning to get married, but then the war came and I went away to fight. While I was gone, she came down with a fever of some sort and died within a week of taking sick.” He paused and Evangeline saw half of a grimace touch his mouth, since he was in profile to her. “I thought she was safe,” he said. “It was my own hide I was worried about at the time.”

“I’m sorry. About your sweetheart, I mean.”