My hopes for finding something suitable are not high but the idea of going somewhere—anywhere—has me saying goodbye to Marie and rushing upstairs to shower in our dingy, dark bathroom with newfound energy.

“Calla, wake up.” A gentle hand jostles my shoulder.

I whimper. Every muscle in my body aches.

“Come on. You gotta see this.”

“Is it the northern lights again?”

He chuckles. “It’s almost nine. The sun’s already coming up. Come on.”

I crack my eyelids to find Jonah already dressed and holding the red terry-cloth robe I bought at the Wasilla Target the other day.

“This better be worth it.” With a shiver, I pull myself out of bed and trail Jonah downstairs. The gentle gurgle of my father’s coffeemaker brewing a fresh pot carries through our empty main floor. Seven days in and everything of Phil’s that we’ve decided not to keep is gone, to the dump or the thrift shop, or charred to ash. Even the animal heads have found a temporary home in the workshop because I couldn’t handle them watching me anymore. And after three days of spelling out all the disgusting things that have likely spilled into the moss-green sisal rug, Jonah finally agreed to roll it up and drag it outside. He’s left it next to the old couch that I also made him remove, in preparation of our new one arriving Friday from a warehouse in Anchorage.

I wasn’t expecting to find anything in the furniture shop in Wasilla when we went that day but, lo and behold, they had the perfect midcentury modern sectional in a dark briar-gray tweed material. Of course, Jonah balked at the price tag. It took two days of whittling him down until I threw it on my credit card and told him he needs to get on board. I am far more excited than I ever thought I could be about a couch.

All that’s left in the house are piles of things I need to clean and organize, furniture that we’ll use until we can replace with new purchases, and a thousand repairs and improvements to make—wood floors to refinish, bathrooms to remodel, nail holes to fill, cracked outlet covers to swap out, door handles to tighten, hinges to oil, appliances to replace. The list goes on and it’s daunting at times, but we have time. Most importantly, though, this log cabin is finally starting to feel like ours and not Phil’s.

I turn toward the kitchen and coffeemaker, but Jonah loops an arm around my waist and pulls me in the opposite direction, past the crackling fire in the stone hearth, and toward the living room bay window.

“Oh, wow …” Two moose stand at the edge of the frozen lake no more than thirty feet away, grazing on dead foliage. The entire vista before me is awe-inspiring—the vast expanse of freshly fallen, crisp snow, the sun that has been hiding behind cloud cover for days on end visible and climbing, its yellow glow bouncing off the stark, white landscape blinding in its intensity. Not until we moved in did I truly appreciate our house’s location—on a peninsula of sorts, where we get the morning sunrise from the east and the evening sunset from the west.

“They’re probably gonna disappear the second I start the tractor to clear the snow,” he murmurs low in my ear, as if they can hear us. And maybe they can.

“That one on the left is huge.” I’ve only ever seen moose from the air, flying above.

“Yeah. She’s probably nine hundred … maybe a thousand pounds. The males can weigh up to eighteen hundred.”

“How do you know it’s a she? I mean …” I tip my head to the side, but I can’t see anything from this angle.

Jonah chuckles. “Definitely that, or the fact that she has no antlers. The males lose their antlers every winter, but they start growing new ones right away.”

“Well, aren’t you a wealth of knowledge.”

“You know, this is all in that wildlife book I gave you for Christmas. That you told me you’ve already read.”

“I was just testing you,” I lie, the humor in my voice betraying me.

“Uh-huh.” He smirks. “The smaller one beside her is a bull calf. She probably had him last summer.”

The two enormous animals continue to graze, undisturbed and seemingly unaware of our presence, though the mother’s ears twitch a few times. “I need to get a picture of this before they leave.” I make to move but Jonah’s hands on my hips hold me in place.

“Don’t worry, they tend to stay within a five-mile radius so you’ll be seeing them around. Just don’t get too close.” He steals a kiss from my neck.

I lean back against Jonah’s chest, content as we watch the mother and her baby. “I’m shocked Phil didn’t add them to the wall.”

“Nah. He would have liked having the wildlife around here.”

And so do I, I realize, as I take in the picturesque scene. “Okay. Fine. You’re allowed to wake me up for stuff like this.”

His deep chuckles carry through the quiet morning, earning another twitch of the moose’s ears.

Chapter Twelve

“Do you think we can fit a bigger tub in here?”

“Not a chance.”

I hit the bathroom light switch on my way out, fresh from a long bath to help ease my aching muscles after ten days of kneeling, lifting, and scrubbing. “Fine. Then we’re turning the little bedroom into another bathroom and taking some space to make this one an en-suite.”

“That’d leave us with only two bedrooms.” Jonah’s back is against the bed frame, his attention glued to my laptop screen. The sleeves of his navy-blue T-shirt stretch over his muscular biceps, distracting me momentarily.

“So? Seriously, Jonah, how many guests are we ever going to have at one time?”

“I was thinking more about kids.”

“Oh. Right.” I consider the bedroom that spans the back of the house as I settle onto my side of the bed. There’s a chill to the air, despite the forced heat pumping through the vents and the logs that Jonah shoved into the fireplace before coming up to bed. Replacing the windows might help, at least in part. “They can have bunk beds.”

“That’d work for two of them. What about the other six?” he says with a solemn tone, his brow furrowed intently on the picture of him and my father on the About page I built for The Yeti website.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the animal you’re breeding with. Maybe she has a den somewhere that can fit them all in.”

His deep chuckle fills our bedroom.

“Any bookings yet?” I ask, teasing. The Yeti’s site has only been live for three days.

“How would I know? You haven’t shown me how to see them.”

I ease in closer to him, resting my chin on his shoulder. “That’s right, I haven’t. I have to make myself indispensable to you somehow.”

Jonah’s blue eyes crawl over my face. “You are indispensable to me. Seriously, I couldn’t have pulled together anything half as good.”

“Wait till you see the itinerary template I finished,” I say, dragging out the two words seductively. Agnes walked me through several examples of forms and gave her official seal of approval—an emailed response with a smiley face on it.

The bed shakes with his laughter. He leans in to skate his lips along my jawline. “Thank you. For everything.”