It hurt, so he stopped. For seven years, Callum had been the kind of man whose footsteps made floorboards grovel. When he walked across their cedar homestead in the upper Blue Mountains, people paused mid-sentence. But standing on the crumbling sandstone ledge at sunrise, his grip loosened around her wrist so gently it felt like rain touching stone.
Josie stared at his calloused fingers. The frost was still biting into the mountain air, turning their breath into white ribbons against the gum trees. 'Why here, Callum?' she asked, her voice smaller than the eucalyptus wind. 'Why did you bring me all the way to the edge of the world just to say goodbye?'
Callum didn't answer with words. He pulled out a rusted iron key from his oilskin coat pocket. It wasn't the key to their farm gate or the cattle pens down in the valley. It was stamped with the initials of a man who was supposed to have perished thirty-five years ago—Josie's biological father.
'Because I promised him I wouldn't touch a cent of this land until you were old enough to understand what was buried underneath it,' Callum whispered. His knuckles were pale with restraint. 'He didn't abandon you, Josie. He was forced into the mountain so you could live.'
Beneath the rusted shale ridge lay an abandoned prospector's tunnel that local town records had struck from the map back in 1991. Callum pulled aside the tangle of mountain scrub, revealing a timbered doorway locked with heavy chains.
Inside, preserved in cedar crates safe from water and termites, were two hundred journals and hand-drawn geological surveys. Her father had discovered a subterranean aquifer that could feed three surrounding drought-stricken shires for a century. Greedy mining syndicates had tried to buy him out for pennies, threatening his family when he refused.
Callum had married into the family not out of convenience or arranged duty, as the town gossip claimed for years, but because he was the sole trusted apprentice sworn to safeguard the deeds until the day Josie took her place as rightful owner.
Standing in the dim glow of his headlamp, tears spilled down Josie's cheeks. 'You let the whole valley despise you for taking over this station,' she said, stepping closer. Callum simply looked down at the key in her palm. 'A real promise doesn't care about noise, Josie. It only cares about the finish line.'
