Jamie Fraser reached the clerk's window five minutes before it closed, and the man behind the glass was already stamping another offer on the same piece of land. Jamie set his coin purse on the counter. He had saved for two years to buy a plot in Loamhollow, a valley of low hills and slow creeks where his beloved could sleep without listening for footsteps. Every night she stayed in the boarding house above the smithy, she woke at every noise. He had promised her a door with a lock they owned. He did not yet have the door, or the walls, or the ground beneath them. The clerk turned the stamped paper so Jamie could read it. The parcel Jamie wanted held an abandoned homestead with an oak frame and a steep tin roof, a porch wide enough for two chairs, and a well that still gave clean water. Jamie had walked the boundary three times. He knew which board on the porch was loose and which window his beloved would choose for her morning light. The name on the competing offer was Callum MacLeod. The clerk said MacLeod had matched the asking price that afternoon and asked for a week to raise the rest. "He wants it for a rental," the clerk said. "You want it to live in. That's not my problem. Highest bid on Friday takes it." Jamie counted what he had. He was short by a third. He walked to the smithy and told his beloved the truth. She listened without interrupting. Then she pulled the silver ring from her finger, the one her grandmother had pressed into her palm before the crossing, and set it on the workbench between them. "Sell it," she said. "I'd rather have the porch." Jamie did not argue. He rode to the pawnbroker before dark and came back with enough to cover the gap and a little over. On Friday morning he stood at the clerk's window again and laid the full sum on the counter in front of Callum MacLeod, who had come with a bank note and a thinner smile than the week before. The clerk stamped the deed in Jamie's name. Jamie walked out holding paper that said the oak-framed house and the ground under it were his. He had a plot. He had no lumber, no roofing nails, no help, and a ring to buy back before his beloved noticed it was gone for good.