Nicole’s shoulders shook as she tried and failed to keep her emotions inside. Link didn’t balk or try to soothe her. He stroked her hair and let her cry against his chest until his sweater was damp with her tears.
And when she finished, he kissed her gently, then stood and disappeared into the room she’d been avoiding since the day she moved into this place—Dad’s room. He wasn’t Buck anymore. He wasn’t some stranger she had no connection with. Link had brought her firsthand accounts of her father’s life that had shaped his image in her mind and given her the knowledge that she was loved. It wasn’t fair that she’d missed his vibrant life, but at least she had this. She had a piece of her dad, and that was more than she thought she would ever have.
Link returned with a small cardboard box with her name scribbled across the top. She sank onto her knees on the wood floor and carefully pulled the top open. It was full of pictures. The one of her in the red jumpsuit hugging him, her high school photo, and so many more. Baby pictures, and her as a toddler asleep on his chest. Her in a carrier on his back while he tramped through the snow with a grin on his face and a trap hanging from a chain in his hand. There was one of him and Mom. Her dad was grinning at the camera, so obviously happy, but Mom looked lost and haunted. That one, she folded in half so she could just see Dad’s joy. There were stacks of artwork she’d done as a child with dates and ages in the corner. A macaroni rainbow had scribbled across the bottom, Look Clotilda! Macaroni! Told you she was my kid! in the same scrawl that was on top of the box. She laughed thickly and set it down, then picked up a stack of letters. There were no addresses, but they all had her full name written across them, as if Dad had been planning on mailing them the second he found out where she lived.
She read the letters in order by date. They began formal and heavy handed, but by the third, he wasn’t talking about the weather anymore. He was talking to her like she was right there beside him. He’d detailed his life at each moment in time. What he had trapped, fur prices, meeting Clotilda, setting up his trap line. He told jokes he had heard and told her about friends and funerals. He sketched animals he saw, and sometimes, instead of signing the letters, he would paint Alaskan scenery with drippy black ink at the bottom. And in the last one, Dad told her what had happened between him and Mom. He told her how Mom had withered here. How he didn’t hate her for leaving because he’d always known it was coming. How she cried at nights, and it had broken his heart piece by piece. How he’d wanted to follow, but she forbade him to. She’d told him if she was ever going to love again and have a normal life, she had to forget him. He’d written that Mom had kept their address a secret from him in case he ever forgot the rules, but if he ever found out where Nicole lived, he was going to send these letters and hope they reached her well.
When she closed the lid to the box, emotionally drained but feeling like the empty well she’d carried in her center had finally been filled, she turned to Link with a ready smile for the man who had given her so much.
“Thank you for doing that. I thought you’d left, but you were tracking down Dad’s friends to interview instead, weren’t you?”
Link sat behind her on the floor and pulled her back tight against his chest. “Yeah. You got me fighting again. I wanted to give you something, too.”
“I don’t want to leave anymore. I don’t want to go back to Mission.”
Link bit the lobe of her ear gently and whispered, “Then don’t leave. Stay here.”
“Well, I have to stay, naturally. You gave me conditions, remember?”
“Yeah, but I want to hear it. I want it to be your choice.”
Nicole twisted in his arms and studied those blazing silver eyes she’d grown to adore. She smiled at how nervous he looked. He didn’t need to be. Not with her.
“You got me fighting too, Link. I’m staying.”
Chapter Ten
Alaska had been kicking up changes in Nicole over the weeks that she’d lived here, and with the decision to stay and give this life her all, she felt like a different person altogether. She looked down at her hands. They weren’t blistered or bleeding anymore. They were calloused and strong. She lifted her gaze to the mirror in the bathroom, and a small smile transformed her face. Proud brown eyes that came from her Yupik lineage, rosy cheeks, and shiny tresses of pitch-colored hair piled high up on her head in a messy bun. She wore mascara, lip moisturizer, and shimmery eye shadow for Link, but she’d stopped covering up the color on her cheek. No longer was she repulsed by it when she looked at her reflection. Instead, she was proud of it.
She only wore the green scarf now to protect her from the chill.