Heidi stays in my arms long after her tears have dried. It feels good to hold her. I don’t want to let go. But at last she presses me gently and rises, her face flushed with crying. Or is that something else?

Without a word she scurries away to the door where she slips on the boots I made her, and her leather coat, disappearing out into the cold.

She returns a while later after I’ve cleared the table and washed the dishes. She keeps her head down, shy perhaps after giving her account. After our long embrace.

She goes straight to her bed and I help her get situated. Her face is still blazing. I straighten and study the back of her crimson ears.

“Are you feeling alright?”

She nods quickly.

She looks feverish. I reach a hand down and feel her cheek. She squeaks softly at my touch. Definitely warm.

“You should rest. I won’t read tonight.”

“No!” she cries, looking up at last, revealing her lovely pink face. “That is—please,” she corrects herself. “Please, I…love listening to your voice. Stories. Love listening to your stories.”

A spark of humor ignites in me. A warm feeling, oddly encouraged.

“Well, then,” I say, going to the chest to take out our latest novel.

Heidi’s eyes light up hopefully. “You’re going to read?”

“Seems I have no choice. Since you love it.”

Weeks pass and my voice grows stronger. I am able to read for longer stretches, much to my audience’s delight. Sometimes she pulls her chair up beside mine to look at the words, which I point out to her, teaching her the letters in my gruff, clumsy way. With her left hand she tries drawing them in the ashes, so that I come home most days to messy letters written all over my floor.

Then one day I come in to find her grinning triumphantly after scratching out the letters to her name on the wall beside the fireplace.

Heidi.

“I did it!” she declares, and I catch myself mirroring her elated grin. She runs right into me and gives me a one-armed hug that leaves me a little stupefied. Especially when she begins to cry.

“I’m not stupid, Rand. I’m not too stupid to learn.”

At this my arms come up automatically, and I catch her in a careful embrace.

“Of course you’re not stupid,” I say, more proud of her than I could ever express. “You’re the cleverest Squirrel I ever met.”

More weeks pass. Heidi’s arm grows stronger, healing slowly, but well.

By mid-December she’s using it again without a problem, and I’m relieved—not just because I get to enjoy her delicious desserts again—but to see there has been no permanent damage to her arm from the break.

Now she’s got her independence back, I’m able to leave the cabin for longer stretches of time. I go out on snowshoes, walking the frozen riverbanks with my axe and my beaver traps.

Beaver pelts are at their thickest in winter, and fetch the best price. I hack holes into the ice to set the traps in the water, baiting them with fresh chopped branches. My traps are designed well to be deadly; they’ll never wound the animal, but kill them instantly. This is consolation to Heidi, who asks me about it one afternoon when I bring a fresh beaver carcass to our table for dinner.

The animals in the stable are doing well. The old horse is enjoying a cozy, restful winter, and the hens give us four, sometimes five eggs a day. My hides continue to tan beautifully, and slowly I’m accumulating another haul for my next visit to town in the spring.

Heidi continues learning to read and write, though she had to learn writing all over again once her right arm healed. Her letters, still scratched out in the soot and sometimes outside in the snow, grow straighter and clearer each day.

We talk easily now, the Squirrel and I, though still not a great deal. We don’t speak of the account she gave me before of Greg Philips; we don’t talk about the past at all. We keep ourselves in the present, working around one another, very easily filling the voids in each other’s lives by simply existing. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.

And then, one evening late in the season, she startles me with an unexpected question.

“Were you always a trapper?” she asks me idly as she sits cross-legged in her bed, crimson skirts spread around her while she works darning my socks. “What did you do before you came to the mountains?”

Sitting in my big chair, I’d been breaking the hide of a newly tanned rabbit skin by rubbing it vigorously against the edge of the table. On hearing her question, though, I pause, heart suddenly seized within me.

She’s braver than me, I realize in that instant. When I asked about her painful past, she recounted it all to me with only a few tears. But when she asks of mine, I can’t speak a word.

I feel the black door opening in me again. Shadows creep out from it, tendrils of memory. Poignant, beautiful. Agonizing.

A golden haired woman in a humble home, blue eyes smiling at me. She smells of sweet porridge. Interrupting my work with a kiss, pressing her swollen belly against my arm…

“Rand?”

I rise suddenly, so furiously I send my chair flying backwards to tumble against the cabin floor.

Heidi cries faintly in surprise, but I do not linger. Throwing on my coat I burst into the night air and stride furiously away.

I don’t get far. The snow is wet and unpleasant. Somewhere beneath it, a layer of mud is starting.

I stop just shy of the creek, staring up at the cloudy night sky.

I’m such a coward. Such a fool. Still running from those memories.

Shouldn’t I be over it already? After all, they’ve been gone nearly thirteen years, now. And they’re not coming back.

“Rand!”

The Squirrel’s voice pulls my gaze. She’s running after me through the slush, struggling with the depth of it. She misses a step and sprawls forward, but she pushes herself up the next second, undaunted. A little in awe of her, I watch her lunge the rest of the way to come crashing into my chest.

“I’m sorry!” she gasps, gazing earnestly into my eyes as she continues to cling to me, a damp, icy embrace. “I was thoughtless. I never would have asked, if—”

Something shifts in me then. A rule I’d not even realized I’d set in my own heart.

Snaps.

I descend upon her suddenly, overtaken by some madness. My fingers are searing hot as I pull her face against mine and she squeaks as I claim her lips fiercely, with a long repressed hunger, and an ache deep in my soul.

Comfort me, Woman.

Against my kiss the Squirrel grows very still. Then her arms lift suddenly and wrap around my neck. She clings to me, practically climbing after me when I start to lift away. I pick her up easily and her legs wrap around my waist as she holds my face in her little hands and kisses me back with shared ferocity.

Heidi.

I think I’ve known for some time she’d respond to me like this. We’ve grown together slowly over the long winter months, from mere companions sharing the same roof to something much closer.

It was only a matter of time, I think as I start to carry her back to the cabin.

She was always going to be mine.

It’s difficult to walk in the snow with this girl weighing me down, but she won’t stop clinging to me, and I refuse to let her go.

We reach the cabin door and I slam her against the outside a bit roughly. Her hands tangle in my hair as she pulls my face down to smother the soft flesh of her neck in hard, hungry kisses.

I don’t give a damn about the cold, I think as my hands trail up her bare thighs. I’m taking her right here.

“Rand,” she gasps. “Rand.”

Rand.

A voice, not the Squirrel’s. From my past. The last time I did this…

A pair of blue eyes flash into my mind. A warm, smiling face.

My heart cracks. Bleeds within me.

Guilt.

I loosen my hold on Heidi with a grunt. I back away from her slowly, letting her slip carefully back to the ground.

“Rand?”

There is a question in her eyes. Hurt.

More guilt.

I grip her arms in my hands and lower my head to press it firmly against the top of hers.

“You did nothing wrong,” I say, my voice hoarse. “I just… need time… A little more time…”

“I… understand,” she says softly, though I’m sure she does not. How could she? But she is kind, my Squirrel. She always puts my needs before her own, and she never asks why.

It’s what I love about her, I realize with a searing ache in my chest. Her quiet selflessness, her willingness to sacrifice when I’m sure she’s the one hurting most of all.

It’s what I’ve always loved about her.