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kitchen, then slipped into his mud boots, pulled up his hood, and went out into the driving rain toward Cat Ransom’s offices.
    He hoped the marriage had finally tanked. It wasn’t that Garner thought Abel was a bad man. His daughter’s husband was, from what Garner could tell, decent and hardworking and descended from tough Russian stock, the kind that could survive Siberian winters with only a pocketknife and a bearskin and a bottle of vodka. The problem was simply that Rose’s marriage to him was beneath her. The Blazing B was a millstone on her neck. She had within her the brains, if not the will, to be a fine doctor. As a girl, that had been her dream. It wasn’t too late.
    He still had the means to fund her opportunities if she would accept his willingness to do it. He would give her whatever she needed to start over.
    Garner walked to Dr. Ransom’s offices briskly, ignoring the storm. The anticipation of his daughter reentering his life after two and a half decades filled him with optimism and fresh energy. She would need him again. Finally. The fast rain poured onto the leathery earth with too much impatience to be absorbed. On the dirt path between his house and the town’s only paved road, where Dr. Ransom’s building was located, Garner’s boots splashed through puddles that had been mere depressions in the land that morning.
    It took Garner less than five minutes to reach Dr. Ransom’s offices, which had been a medical office since miners first settled Burnt Rock in the late eighteen hundreds. The flat-roofed, box-shaped building was wrapped in horizontally mounted tongue-and-groove siding and painted white. A second-floor balcony supported by turned-wood posts and decorative bracings provided a covering over the walkway.
    Garner thought the place looked eternally ready to stage a fight between drunken gunslingers. But there wasn’t a cowboy in sight. Electrical lights installed under the balcony swung from their chains in the gusty air and threw grim shadows around the ineffective shelter.
    Cat shared her building with Nova’s bookstore. It was an eclectic pairing, but the entire town was that way. Across a gravel driveway was a twin building that held Mazy’s café and Hank’s hardware store. On the opposite side of the road, the only paved road in all of Burnt Rock, was a drugstore that doubled as a post office, the town hall, and a gift shop that sold polished rocks and tiny bottles filled with gold leaf. Two zigzagging miles up the mountain behind the gift shop, hidden now by dense clouds, was the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly church-slash-museum-slash-monument.
    Garner pounded on the glass window to which gold letters had been applied in an arc. “Catherine Ransom, M.D. If the Doctor Isn’t in, Dial:” And her cell phone number was listed beneath this. Publishing her cell phone number saved Cat the expense of having to hire an office assistant to take appointments and man the office whenever she wasn’t there.
    The door-pounding was only an announcement of his presence, not a request to be let in. Garner entered without waiting and brushed water off his slick jacket onto the dry floor of the doctor’s waiting room.
    “Cat, girl! Have I got news!”
    Catherine Ransom emerged from her back office holding a cup of something steaming. She set down her drink and came around the counter quickly to take Garner’s coat.
    “Garner! Are you all right? Why are you out in this mess?”
    He held the coat closed at his neck, intending to talk her into taking him out of Burnt Rock as soon as possible. “I need a ride.”
    “You should have called. I’d have come and picked you up.”
    Garner laughed, because the very sensible idea of calling this woman, who was more like a daughter this past year than Rose had ever been, hadn’t occurred to him.
    “I can’t keep up with that kind of common sense, can I?”
    “You’re not sick, are you?”
    “Oh no. It’s my daughter.”
    A shadow flitted