Chapter One

Under a sunny New Mexico sky, jeweler, Jake Connors, looked from his deceased wife’s gravestone out at the Santa Fe landscape of lonely distances and long silences. A man invested his mind, heart, trust, and time into things with intentions and goals. Sometimes they panned out and other times they certainly did not. With the death of his wife, Sierra, his heart had been challenged in ways that he didn’t see coming and that never had left him as ‘in it alone’ as he was now.

Since Sierra’s death three long years ago, he had been making the trek to her grave on a weekly basis to talk about the business they had built together, although he knew in the silence that he was only talking to himself. She had been laid to rest. He needed to let her, and move on, as she had encouraged him to do from her death bed. Easier said than done, he thought. But, it was that or quit, and he was no quitter. Tough times didn’t last. Tough people did.

He jiggled his keys, glanced down at the gravestone one last time, turned, and called to his dog. “Come on, Lewie, time to go to work.”

Back at his jewelry store on the Santa Fe Plaza, he completed the wax carving of his latest jewelry design. He then attached the carving to a wax tree, along with other pieces ready to be cast, being mindful of the best angle for liquid metal to flow. He next placed the wax tree into a plastic-filled canister and poured a special plaster over it, then heated it in the kiln where it would stay overnight. During the process, the wax would burn out and create an empty space, wherein either melted silver or gold would be poured, like love coursing hot through a man’s veins, filling his woman with himself, as an expression of all things beautiful and binding between them.

Only Jake didn’t need to be reminded that sometimes jewelry, like relationships, didn’t always last, no matter how beautiful, or the amount of care lavished on them.

Still, the creative process continued to flow. Today he was working on his signature copyrighted rings and pendants. He pulled off his goggles and looked up to see a woman with blonde hair in a thick braided ponytail, threaded through a sparkling, mult