“What?”

“Set her down!” he roared, and shoved the yoke forward with his right hand.

The Cessna took a nosedive.

“You son of a bitch!” She grabbed the yoke. “All right, you want down, you get down!”

The Cessna went into a shallow spiral, down, down, down, and Liam felt all the blood rise from his groin to pool just beneath the top of his skull. His lungs stopped working at fifteen hundred feet, his heart at a thousand, his sphincter muscle at five hundred. The needle on the altitude gauge backed off until the number one, one hundred feet, and Liam risked a look out his window to see the gear about to skim the tops of trees, growing ever larger in his terror-stricken eyes. “Wy!”

Her face was tight but she said coolly enough, “You're paying the freight. You wanted down, you get down,” and in the next second the trees ended and a gravel runway appeared. The Cessna set down on a surface that was more root than rock and bounced to a lurching halt. Wy slammed her headset into its cradle and baled out to march up and down, swearing at him, swearing at herself, swearing at the strip, just generally laying a pretty good curse on life, the universe and everything.

Liam waited for his heart and lungs to resume normal function and his stomach to settle, and climbed out on shaky legs.

Wy wheeled around and poked him in the chest with a furious finger. “Of all the goddamn dumb things for you to do, that took the cake! You want to land, we can land, but I'll do it! You want to talk, we can talk, but on my terms! Don't you pull something like that in one of my planes ever again, do you hear?”

“I hear,” Liam said, a bit light-headed and very glad to be back on terra firma. The strip, made of gravel and sand, seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, with no reason for its existence, a not unheard of occurrence in the Bush. The rustle of the black cottonwood and the balsam poplar in the gentle breeze, the tumble of water down a creek, the distant cry of an eagle were all that broke the silence. “What is this place?”

“Some oil company built it to drill a test well for natural gas,” she said curtly, still steaming.

“Was there any?”

“No.”

“Wy,” he said.

Her head snapped up, but whatever she'd been about to say died on her lips when she met his eyes.

“I think three months is enough,” he said. “You were angry. So was I. We said some things we shouldn't have. It hasn't changed how I feel about you.” His smile was brief and painful. “ Sometimes I wish it had. Sometimes I think you're more trouble than you're worth, Chouinard.”

“You should talk,” she replied automatically, but her hackles went down. She pulled off her cap and shook back her braid. There was a downed tree to one side of the runway and she walked over to sit on it.

He walked over to sit next to her, carefully maintaining a discreet distance. He wanted her right down to his fingernails, but the words were important, and came first. Before him, he thought with a inward grin, and almost laughed out loud.

“What?” she said, eyes on the cap she was pulling through her fingers. “What was so all-fired important you had to nearly wreck my plane to tell me?”

All impulse to laugh faded, and he sorted through what he'd been planning to say for three months, if not quite in this fashion or in this setting.

“You live awhile,” he said slowly, feeling his way. He wanted to get this right. He wasn't as confident as he used to be of his ability to do that, not anymore. There were a lot of things he wasn't as sure of as he used to be. “You live awhile,” he repeated, “and you gain some knowledge, and you hope a little wisdom, and you build this picture of yourself. You have sense, and integrity. You know what you will do, and what you won't. You draw a line, a line you know you won't cross, because you're a better person than that.”

He glanced at her. She was staring hard at the opposite side of the runway.

“And then something happens, something you never expected, something you never imagined, and you find yourself doing something you never thought you'd do. You cross that uncrossable line, and that picture you had of yourself shatters. If you ever want to be sane again, you have to pick up the pieces and try to put the picture back together. But now it's flawed, cracked, out of focus. It'll never be the same.”

He stopped, unable for a moment to go on.

“I know.” Her voice was soft. “I know everything that you're saying. I know because I went through the same thing. But there is more to it than that.”

He turned to look at her. “What?”

“I could have lived with the loss of my integrity, Liam,” she said. “I could even have lived with the loss of your love. But I missed my friend.”

He closed his eyes briefly.

“My integrity was gone, that picture of myself was gone, my lover was gone. And my friend was gone. We were friends first, Liam. I knew you were married. I knew about Charlie. Left to myself, I wouldn't have pushed it beyond friendship, not ever, no matter how much I was attracted to you. I don't do that! I've never done that, ever.”

“And I did,” he said, his voice wooden.

“Yes,” she said. “You did. But I let you. I'm not blaming it all on you. We did it together. That's part of it, too. I'm not a homewrecker.” She paused, and added painfully, “And then I was one.”

There was silence for a few moments. Liam could think of nothing to say.

A raven croaked somewhere off in the treetops. Liam looked up, but couldn't see him.

“I've got a puritan streak a mile wide, Liam. No matter how much I hated the waste of what we could have given each other, of what we could have been, of what together we could have given others, there was a little voice inside that said we did the right thing. You belonged with Jenny and Charlie, and I had no business, no right to try to tempt you away from them.” She faced Liam squarely. “You said the words, Liam. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, so long as you both shall live. Till death do you part.” She shook her head. “Nobody ever thinks about what those words really mean when they say them.”

“Maybe not nobody,” Liam said. “But damn few.”

She nodded. “Damn few,” she echoed.

“And not me.”

“No,” she said softly.

There was a short silence as they listened to the creek chuckle beyond the trees. “Jenny's dead,” Liam said.

“I know. Moses told me. I'm sorry.” She turned to meet his eyes. “I mean that, Liam. From everything you told me, I think Jenny and I could have been friends.” She swallowed, and added in a painful whisper, “And I know you loved her. Maybe not like… Well. I know you loved her. Loved them.”

“Yes.” He thought of little baby Charlie, all cherub cheeks and lion's roar, and grieved again.

There was another silence. “What now?” Liam said at last.

She didn't look at him. “You'll notice I've never said those words. So long as you both shall live.”

“I've noticed,” he said, a little grimly. “And I have, and I didn't keep them.”

“That's not where I was headed, Liam,” she said, a little impatiently. “God, let's just set aside the blame for one minute, okay? We both made mistakes, big, fat, juicy ones, all right?” She turned to look at him, eyes level and serious. The sun sidled out from behind a cloud and turned her hair into a gleaming helmet of dark gold. “You asked me to marry you, remember?”

“I remember.”

“You had no right to, and I had no right to listen. But you asked.”

“You didn't answer.”

“No. I didn't.”

“Why?”

“Because however much I loved you, I wasn't sure I could say those words and mean them,” she said simply.

It hurt, more than he would have expected it to. It took him a moment to form a reply. “And now?”

“And now?” She turned away from him. “I don't know, Liam.”