Page 23 of Riding with the President Biker

"Leah..."

I step past him toward the corridor that leads to the stairs, and I hear him fall into step behind me without looking back to check, because I already know he is there.

The door at the top of the stairs opens.

We both walk through it.

Epilogue — Hansen

Three Years Later

The snow tonight is kind.

Not the heavy, driving kind that comes in sideways and makes the roads treacherous and gives everyone in Whitetail Falls a reason to stay inside and look at their phones.

This is the kind that drifts, slow and deliberate, settling on rooftops and railings and the bare branches of the oak at the end of the street like it has nowhere urgent to be. I have been sitting on this porch long enough that a thin layer has collected on the toe of my left boot, and I have not moved to shake it off.

I have been paying attention to this town for as long as I can remember. It is the particular habit of a man responsible for something, you watch it, constantly, measuring it against the version in your memory, noting the drift.

What I was not paying attention to, until the night a window exploded and a woman pressed her hands against me, was what it might feel like to sit on a porch in February and feel nothing more pressing than the cold.

The door behind me opens.

I hear the soft weight of her footsteps. She comes outside wearing my flannel over whatever she had on inside, the sleeves falling past her wrists, and she does not say anything immediately, just surveys the snow falling over the street below with the same unhurried consideration she gives most things.

Then she reaches down and steals my drink.

"I had about a third of that left," I say.

"You had about a quarter." She takes a sip and tilts her head, evaluating it. "Also it's warm."

"I've been outside for twenty minutes."

"Exactly." She hands it back, which is generous of her, and leans against the porch railing across from me with her arms folded against the chill.

The light from the window behind me catches the ring on her left hand as she settles her weight, and it does what it always does — throws a small, sharp scatter of light that is frankly visible from a reasonable distance.

She spent the first two weeks after I put it on her making jokes about light pollution.

"You're doing it again," she says.

"Doing what."

"Staring at the ring like you're proud of yourself."

"I am proud of myself."

She lifts her hand and examines it with theatrical gravity. "It's enormous, you know. I bumped it against a patient's chart yesterday and the man actually looked up."

"Good."

"That's not a normal response."

"Sure it is." I stretch my legs out and look at her over the glass. "Every man in a fifty-mile radius can see you're spoken for. That's efficient."

She stares at me for a long moment. "You're a caveman."

"You said yes."