I Saw My Alpha Mate's Betrayal, So I Changed Fate novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Signal Peak

"Yes," I said.

His shoulders dropped with relief.

"You didn't make me wait very long."

"You asked. I already knew."

The first snow came to the peaks in the third week of October.

I woke up one morning and the western mountains were white to their shoulders, and the air through the glass smelled like iron.

The cook declared it a sign.

The sisters declared it an excuse to stop working on the woodpile.

We had ten days.

I made the list myself, at the plank table, with a pencil.

The crew. Sophie.

My mother. My father. Lowell.

The eldest elder, to say the words.

The rancher's family, who'd sent a letter up the ridge road in a child's handwriting that just said THANK YOU FOR THE TROUGH.

That was everybody.

Nobody from the bridal shop. No seven elders in carved chairs. No seating chart.

"That's short," Sophie said, reading it over my shoulder.

"That's everybody who'd climb a mountain for it."

"I'd climb two."

"I know. That's why you're first."

My mother came up four days before, with a garment bag over her arm.

She laid it on Gran's bunk and unzipped it, and stood back with her hands twisted together.

It was a dress.

Plain white wool, long sleeves, warm enough for a catwalk at the end of October.

At the cuffs and around the neck was Gran's lace.

I touched it.

The ivory lace from the sleeves of my old dress, the one Iris had worn into the fire.

"I went to the dressmaker after the council," my mother said. "She still had what was left of it."

"Most of it was ruined. But she got the lace off the sleeves."

"I washed it by hand. Four times. The smoke wouldn't come out at first."

"Mom."

"I sewed it on myself. It's not as good as hers. The left cuff's crooked."

It was crooked.

I put my arms around her for the first time since the night in July.

She held on, afraid I'd change my mind.

I didn't.

The night of the full moon was cold and perfectly clear.

The crew strung the cook's lanterns along the catwalk rail, and the snow on the peaks went pink, then blue.

Everybody climbed the stairs past the black scorch at the bottom, which Abel had refused to sand off.

"It stays," he'd said. "It's the best thing that ever happened to those stairs."

There wasn't room for everyone on the catwalk.

They stood on the stairs, and on the rock below, and the rancher's kids sat on the trapper's shoulders.

My father stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hands in his pockets.

He'd asked me two days ago if he could come up to the catwalk.

I'd said the stairs were good.

He'd said the stairs were more than he'd earned.

Lowell came up behind me in the cab, just before.

He was in a clean flannel shirt, the white gloves gone now. His hands were still shiny and stiff.

"Your hem's caught," he said.

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