"I'll come get you," Walt said. "Bring the fiddle. Leave the cautionary tale."
He took the tractor as far as the county road and the truck the rest of the way, arriving in a roar of diesel and snow spray. Ruth climbed up into the cab with a scarf over her auburn waves and the fiddle case hugged to her chest, brown smoky liner vivid against the pale cold of her face, glossy terracotta lips chapped from the wind and still somehow resolute. They plowed back to the Harlan place in a silence that felt companionable rather than strained. That night she slept in the spare room under quilts Eleanor's mother had stitched, and Walt lay awake in his own bed listening to the house settle around a second heartbeat of presence. In the morning he made pancakes that were uneven and earnest. She declared them a triumph. They spent the snow day reading aloud from a battered Louis L'Amour paperback and pausing whenever Ruth wanted to argue with the plot, which was often.
"You argue with everything," Walt said, amused.
"I argue with things I like," Ruth said. "It's how I pay attention."
By Christmas the town had decided they were a story worth watching. Walt felt the eyes and tried not to bristle. Ruth handled it with the ease of someone who had played for drunk rooms and sober churches alike—smiling, deflecting, refusing to perform a romance for an audience that had not paid admission. They spent Christmas Eve at Margaret and Dale's: ham, carols sung off-key, Margaret's daughter teaching Ruth a clapping game that dissolved into laughter. Walt watched Ruth in the glow of the Ellison tree and felt something in his chest unclench that he had not known was still locked. Christmas morning they exchanged gifts at the ranch—simple ones. He gave her a soft wool scarf the color of dry grass. She gave him a small tin of spare fiddle strings and a note that said, For the vest pocket. In case of signs.