“I am impossible,” he agreed.

“And…”

“And I love you, too.”

She disappeared into the living room. God, she was still so beautiful. When he had married her twenty-five years ago, he had wanted nothing else than to grow old with her. And now, that had happened. He was fifty years old today. Fifty years old, and in love with another woman.

Clare pulled over to the side of the dirt road and fished her flashlight out of the glove compartment. Her sweet little Shelby Cobra, which had been such a bargain because it was rebuilt, didn’t have a working dome light. She thumbed the light on and studied the directions John Huggins had given her. She kept her right foot tromped down hard, because her car also didn’t have a functioning parking brake. The timing chain had broken twice since she bought it, and the muffler was about to fall off in a shower of rust flakes, but the Shelby went like she had a 455 rocket, and the heater was a regular blast furnace, a fact she was grateful for on this below-freezing morning.

Okay, she had gone off the paved road and had already passed two dirt roads to her left. Huggins had warned her that the multiple access roads to the Haudenosaunee land would be confusing. According to her directions, she had another half mile to go, and then a right turn into a dirt road marked with stone pillars should bring her to the main camp.

Sure enough, in a matter of minutes she was turning past two riverstone obelisks and wending her way even higher into the mountains over a switchback road drifted deep with dead leaves. She was just starting to worry that she had taken a wrong turn despite the directions when the trees crowding in on both sides of the road opened up and her tires crunched onto gravel.

Her first glimpse of Haudenosaunee surprised her. She was expecting something grand, an Adirondack-themed fantasia with peeled-birch Gothic trim and a rack of antlers over the door.