Chapter 19: The Proposal

~ Emmie ~

She knew the moment the grandmother took Kanti’s hand.

Not suspected. Knew. The way you knew weather before it arrived, the way she had learned to read this country — in the body first, before the mind had words for it. The grandmother appeared at the lodge entrance in the late afternoon with the unhurried certainty of a woman who had already decided how the evening would go, and she said something to Kanti, and Kanti looked at Emmie with that expression — the level, satisfied, elaborately innocent expression of a small person whose arrangements were proceeding exactly as planned — and took his grandmother’s hand and went.

He looked back once. Just once. The look said: I know what I’m doing. Trust me.

She watched them go and then she was alone in the lodge and the knowing settled over her like the first cold of winter — sudden, total, changing the quality of everything.

She built the fire up because her hands needed something to do.

She told herself to be calm. She was not calm. She was fourteen years old and she had walked eight days through the mountains and survived a storm and learned to tan a hide and learned to ride and learned a language and become someone’s mother and somewhere in all of that had fallen completely and irreversibly in love with a man who said her name like it was the only word in any language that mattered, and now she was alone in a lodge in the deep of winter waiting for that man to walk through the entrance and she was not calm at all.

She went through every version of it.

Perhaps she had misread everything. Perhaps the grandmother had simply wanted Kanti for the evening and it meant nothing. Perhaps Five Crows would not come. Perhaps the watching and the rawhide and the hand at her elbow and her name in his voice and the two breaths at the dismount and the quartz set between them in the firelight — perhaps all of it meant something different than what she had understood it to mean and she had been building an entire edifice on a foundation that existed only in her own hoping.

She knew this was not true. She knew it the way she knew the North Star was north. But knowing did not stop the fear, because the fear was not really about whether she had read him correctly. The fear was about what happened after. About what it meant to say yes to something this large, in a world this far from anything she had known before, with her whole remaining life as the stake.

She had lost so much. Her mother. Her father, somewhere out there not returning. The wagon. The plan. Everything she had thought her life was going to be.

She had found so much more than she lost.

But the finding had cost her every certainty she had ever owned, and standing on the edge of another enormous yes felt like standing at the top of a very high place and looking down — not because she didn’t want to jump, but because she was aware, with every part of her that had learned caution on the hard road, exactly how far it was to the bottom.