Chapter 13 Was it the northern Rockies-logging country?? It was so far north and so bitterly cold-what was she doing out there alone? Gideon Holt's gut dropped. A panic he couldn't leash surged back-she'd really gone that far, and she'd chosen a place where a person could simply disappear. She meant to vanish from him. "Keep looking. Put more men on it. If you have to, turn that town upside down and bring her back," he ordered, the steel in his voice threaded with urgency-and something like fear. He paced the study, then remembered an old training plan he needed from years back. He crouched to open the lowest desk drawer-the one he hardly ever touched. He didn't find the file. He did knock over a small metal box tucked in the corner, rust freckles along its edge. The box thumped to the floor and sprang open. Odds and ends spilled out-yellowed slips of paper, a few faded stamps, and a thin notebook with worn corners. Gideon frowned and picked up the notebook. He knew the box; Angela tossed miscellaneous things in it. He'd never cared enough to look. He flipped it open. Her handwriting looked back at him, neat and steady. It wasn't a diary. Page after page, it was... medical notes and medication logs. [March 4, 1973] Gideon came down with a bad cold and was coughing nonstop. I'd heard a warm pear-and-honey syrup helps, but I knocked the pot over while making it and blistered the back of my hand, so I applied burn ointment. [June 19, 1975] Gideon's stomach pain flared again, so I made a slow-cooked, stomach-soothing broth and watched the pot until three a.m. [August 21, 1976] I covered for Gideon at a unit dinner and drank too much; my stomach lining was irritated. The doctor advised observation, but I kept quiet and filled the prescription myself. [December 10, 1977] The cold settled into my joints after the flood. My knees ache terribly on rainy days- worst at night-so sleep is poor. A warm compress helps. The doctor says it may never fully heal. Entry after entry-scalds, stomach spells, cold and joint pain. A few he dimly remembered. Most he had never even known. The flood. He'd thought she only "caught a chill." Not that every storm wrung pain from her knees. And she had never once complained to his face or cried out in pain. She handled it. Then smiled, and cooked, and kept the house moving. Gideon's fingers trembled around the notebook. His chest thudded with a heavy, muffled hurt. For the first time he saw, without illusion, what those "quiet" ten years had cost her. From the cracked doorway came the thin braid of voices of Army wives visiting in the courtyard. "Angie's gone? You're kidding... what a good girl. Such a loss." "Good? She doted on Captain Holt like no one else. When he had that acute bleed in his stomach, she sat bedside three days and nights straight-never even closed her eyes." "That's nothing. Remember the winter he shipped out on that risky op? She slipped off to a hilltop chapel outside town and crawled up hundreds of frozen steps on her knees to beg for his protection. She came back with a St. Christopher medal-her knees were raw and frostbitten." "Women like that... you don't find them twice." Their voices faded down the hall. Gideon stood in place as if lightning had struck him. The stomach bleed-he remembered waking to her drawn face and chalked it up to poor sleep. Three days and nights? A winter pilgrimage-on her knees-those steps. He recalled how oddly she walked for a stretch, and when he asked, she brushed it off as a little bruise. He hadn't wondered once. Each forgotten piece, each unknown sacrifice, was a hammer, beating cracks through the ice he'd sealed around his heart and the certainty he'd carried like armor. Florence Florence is a passionate reader who finds joy in long drives on rainy days. She's also a fan of Italian makeup tutorials, blending beauty and elegance into her everyday life.