Chapter 20 - The Horizon Ahead
As the sun began to dip toward the western peaks, painting the sky in deep shades of amber and violet, a pickup truck drove up the newly carved gravel road.
It was a local carpenter from Boone named Thomas, bringing a load of hand-hewn oak posts for the gateway. With him in the passenger seat was a young woman I hadn't seen before.
She stepped out of the truck, brushing sawdust from her canvas overalls. She had dark hair tied back with a bandana, steady hazel eyes, and a sketchbook tucked under her arm.
“Mason?” Thomas called out, waving a calloused hand. “Brought the lumber you asked for Arthur’s Gate. And brought my niece, Clara. She just finished her master’s in landscape ecology down at Chapel Hill. Heard about what you’re building up here for the youth sanctuary and swore she wouldn’t let you pour concrete until she showed you how to preserve the creek bed.”
Clara walked up to the knoll where I stood, offering a warm, firm handshake. Her smile was honest, without a trace of calculation, performance, or hidden motive.
“I looked at your site plans in the town hall filings,” Clara said, opening her sketchbook to show detailed pencil drawings of stone retaining walls and native fern plantings. “Your architecture is incredible, Mason. But if you build the east wing five yards further up the slope, you won’t have to touch a single hundred-year-old oak tree.”
I looked from her drawing to the majestic oak standing proudly against the twilight sky.
“You’re right,” I said, meeting her eyes. “Let’s save the tree.”
She smiled, a quiet, brilliant light crossing her face.
Far below in the valleys, the wreckage of my past lay cold and dead. Richard Vance was bankrupt, facing federal tax audits. Nora was lost in the anonymity of the life she had brought upon herself. The lies, the ambushes, the forced confessions—they had all burned down to dust.
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Up here, on the mountain Arthur had saved for me, the first stone had been laid.
I took a deep, full breath of the evening wind, turned back toward the blueprints on the table, and for the first time in thirty years, looked forward to tomorrow.