Chapter One
Preston Ranch, near Albany, New York
The dough fought back, and Zoe was glad of the fight.
At twenty-six, she had learned that flour beneath her fingernails was finer company than silence at the kitchen table.
On the mornings Brody rode out early for the south pasture, the silence in the kitchen carried weight enough to bruise.
Better to knead and better to push the heel of her hand into flour and water and yeast and salt and watch the dough yield, breath by breath, than to sit with her hands folded and wait for whatever came next.
“Brody,” she called, hearing his footfalls on the back stairs. “Coffee’s still warm if you want a second cup.”
“No time, Zo,” her brother answered from the hall. The old name floated in. He had used it for her since she was small enough to fit under his arm, and Zoe paused in her kneading and held it for a moment in her ears.
He stepped into the doorway, already in his coat, his dark hair damp from the washbasin and his pale eyes squinting against the bright morning.
He had grown into their father’s frame in the past year, broad through the shoulders and tall enough to fill a doorway.
The resemblance still struck her sometimes when the light caught him a certain way.
“Storm coming in from the west by Thursday,” he said, pulling on his gloves. “I want the stock down off the high field before then.”
“I’ll have stew waiting,” Zoe replied, smiling at him.
“You’re a good sister, Zo.”
He crossed the kitchen in three strides and kissed the top of her head, as he had since she was eight and he’d been tall enough to reach. The smell of him, for a brief moment, was lye soap and saddle leather and her childhood. Then he was gone, the back door clattering shut behind him.
Zoe watched the door for a long second. The dough sagged under her hands.
Lord, she prayed silently, as she had prayed every morning for a year, keep him mine. I know You gave him a wife and I am glad of it. But he was my brother first, and I am asking You, please, do not let me lose him.
Footsteps padded down the front stairs. Bonnie—Brody’s wife—had a tread Zoe could pick out in any room of the house: light, slow and deliberate. Every step was a small announcement.
“Oh, you’re up,” Bonnie said sweetly as she rounded the corner into the kitchen, pulling her wrapper closer around her narrow waist. “I didn’t hear you.”
The morning light caught her where she stopped in the doorway, picking out the gold in her hair and the smooth line of her cheek.
She was very lovely, Bonnie. Twenty-one, with a small straight nose and high color and an even row of perfect teeth, the sum of which, by her own frequent accounting, had turned strangers’ heads on the street since she was thirteen.
Brody had walked into her at a town dance two years past and come home grinning like a man struck on the head with the prettiest hammer the Lord ever made.
He had married her three months later, and Zoe had kissed her new sister on both cheeks at the wedding and prayed they would all be happy.
The Lord was working on the happy. Zoe trusted Him. She did wish He would hurry.
“Coffee’s still warm,” Zoe offered, gesturing toward the iron stove with a floured wrist. “And there’s bread starting.”
“I see that.” Bonnie crossed to the table, lifted the cloth off the rising dough, and looked down at it for a long moment. “It’s a little heavy, isn’t it?”
“It’s fine. The yeast was new this week.”
“Mama always said heavy bread was a sign of a heavy hand,” Bonnie said, smiling. “But you do your best, I’m sure.”
Zoe drew in a breath through her nose and pushed her palms into the dough.
Be still. Be still.
“Did Brody say when he’d be in for supper?” Bonnie asked, taking a cup down from the shelf and pouring herself coffee.
“Storm coming Thursday. He’ll be working long days till then.”
“Mm. Pity.”
Bonnie sat at the head of the table, in Brody’s chair, where their father used to sit, and where Zoe still pulled the tablecloth straight every morning out of an old habit she had carried from the days when her father still filled it. Bonnie sipped her coffee with a small, satisfied sigh.
“How’s the new pattern coming?” Bonnie asked after a moment. “The one for the parlor cushion?”
The mock interest was a sharper instrument than the dig at the bread. Zoe forced her hands to keep moving.
“Well enough,” she answered. “I hope to finish it before the harvest.”
“Oh, before the harvest. Goodness. So a year, you mean.”
A small laugh, like a bell. Zoe smiled because a smile was the safest thing to do.
“Two months at most.”
“Take your time, Zo. We aren’t in any rush. It is your home, after all. For as long as you need it.”
There it was. The little kindness that left a mark.
Bonnie set her cup down with a small click.
“Have you given any thought to where you’ll go, Zoe?” she asked lightly.
“Where I’ll go?”
“Eventually. Brody and I have been talking. The baby will come in winter, you see, and we’ll need the small bedroom for the nursery. I thought it kinder if you and I spoke first, woman to woman.”
Zoe’s hands stopped in the dough.
“You’re with child?”
“Three months. Brody is over the moon.”
“Oh, Bonnie. That’s wonderful news!”
“It is, isn’t it?” Bonnie’s smile was lovely and even and aimed straight at her. “We’ve been thinking about the future. How the house will work? Where the new one will sleep? We’ll need that room, Zoe. By Christmas.”
The kitchen was very quiet. The dough sat under Zoe’s hands, half-warm and half-formed.
“By Christmas?” she repeated.
“You’re twenty-six, Zoe. There must be somewhere for you to go.
A boarding house in town. Cousins, maybe?
Aunt Iris in Buffalo took her sister in once, after the sister had passed marrying age and never found anyone.
There are places for women in your circumstances.
We’ll help you find one and send a little money, even. ”
Bonnie reached across the table and laid her hand on Zoe’s flour-dusted wrist, warm and friendly and final.
“Brody loves you,” Bonnie said softly. “He is too soft to say it. So I am being the strong one. Wives must be.”
Zoe pulled her wrist back. Her face grew very hot, then very cold, and somewhere underneath the heat and the cold, a crack began to form.
She wiped her hands on her apron slowly, finger by finger.
“I think,” she said, as steady as she could manage, “I’d like to step outside for a moment.”
“Of course you would, dear.”
The garden behind the house was a wall of June.
Roses tangled along the south fence in pink and red, peonies bloomed fat as fists, and the iris bed her mother had planted twenty years ago was heavy with purple and gold.
Zoe walked into the middle, blind to all of it, and sat down hard on the stone bench beside the apple tree.
For a moment, she could only breathe.
The apple tree above her dropped a single soft petal onto the back of her hand. Then another. Then five at once, like a small mercy from above.
“Lord,” she whispered.
Her words ran out. She bent forward and pressed her forehead against her knees.
“Lord, You see me. I know You see me. I do not know what I am to do.”
The honeybees worked the iris bed and went on with their morning. A wren in the elm at the end of the garden made an opinion known to the world. The breeze that came down from the orchard smelled of cut hay and warm earth.
“I have prayed for Brody. I have prayed for Bonnie. I have prayed for myself to be smaller and quieter and easier in this house and here I am, Lord, at twenty-six, kneading bread in a kitchen that doesn’t want me, and now there is to be a baby, and I am to be without a roof over me.
I cannot be smaller anymore. There is no smaller for me to be. ”
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Her shoulders shook.
“Tell me what to do,” she whispered. “Please. Anything. I will go anywhere.”
“Zoe Marie.”
Zoe lifted her head.
Elsie Keller stood at the gate in the south fence, a small basket on her arm and concern softening her old face.
Her grey hair was tucked under a sun bonnet, and her apron was striped blue and white from the morning’s washing.
She had been Zoe’s mother’s friend before she was Zoe’s, and she had an uncanny gift; she had always arrived at the kitchen door at the moments Zoe most needed her, as though she kept a calendar in heaven.
“Mrs. Keller,” Zoe managed, scrubbing at her face with the heel of her hand. “Forgive me. I was just...”
“Praying,” Elsie said gently, lifting the latch and letting herself through. “I heard. Forgive me for listening. The wind was carrying.”
She crossed the iris bed in a few quick steps, set her basket down on the bench, and sat beside Zoe in one easy motion. She smelled of lemon balm and oatmeal soap, and her shoulder, when she put her arm around Zoe, was thin and warm and exactly like Mama’s had been.
Zoe held still for one breath, two, and then she broke.
She wept against Mrs. Keller’s shoulder for what could have been a minute or could have been ten. Mrs. Keller held her steady, and her hand made slow circles between Zoe’s shoulder blades, patient as a sundial.
When Zoe could speak again, she sat up and wiped her eyes on the corner of her sleeve.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Keller.”
“For what, child?”
“For weeping on you.”
“My apron has been wept on by worse women than you, Zoe,” Elsie said, smiling soft and sad. “Tell me what’s happened.”
Zoe drew a breath and she told Mrs. Keller everything. The bread, the cushion pattern, the chair at the head of the table. The baby. The little bedroom that would be needed by the first snow. The hand on her wrist.
Wives must be.
Elsie listened until Zoe had finished. Then she sat very still for a long moment, with her hand laid against Zoe’s cheek and her old blue eyes far away.
“That girl,” Elsie said at last, almost to herself, “wants a switching.”
A wet, hiccupping laugh broke out of Zoe.
“Mrs. Keller!”
“I’ll save it for later. I am too old to lift my arm, in any case.” Elsie patted her cheek and let her hand drop. “Now. Listen to me, Zoe Marie.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I came over this morning to bring you eggs,” Elsie said briskly. “I had two dozen and a heart full of news, and the news has been pressing at me for three days. I thought to myself, today, I will tell her today. And here you are in tears, and that is the Lord at His old work. Are you listening?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you remember Mary Collins?”
Zoe blinked. The name reached her from a long way off.
“Of course. Your friend who passed.”
“My dearest.” Mrs. Keller stopped for a while.
“The summer before your mother. Mary and I grew up two miles apart, two hayfields and one creek between us, and when she married Joseph and went out to Montana with him, I thought my heart would break for the loss of her. I wrote her every Sunday for thirty years. She has been gone six years now.”
“I am sorry, Mrs. Keller.”
“Listen to me, child. Mary had two boys and a girl. The girl is gone now too, the Lord rest her, and her little daughter has been taken in by Mary’s eldest, Wade Collins.
Wade is thirty-three. He runs the ranch his father built.
He was the apple of Mary’s eye, that boy, and the most stubborn creature the Lord ever set on a horse, but his heart is true.
Joseph passed shortly after Mary, in a fire, and Wade has been running the place alone since. ”
Elsie reached into her basket and pulled out a folded square of paper.
“He’s looking for a wife.”
The words sat very still in the warm June air.
“A wife?” Zoe repeated.
“He needs help with the little girl, Sadie. She’s eight, bright, and has a temper, by Wade’s reckoning, that could light a stove.
He wrote to me last month and asked if I knew of any young woman of good character and patient hand who might consider the thing.
I thought of you, Zoe Marie, the moment I read the letter.
I thought of you that very morning. I have been praying on it ever since. ”
Elsie held the folded paper out.
“This is his address. The rest is between you and the Lord.”
Zoe took the paper.
Her fingers were trembling. The paper rattled faintly between them. She pressed her thumb against the fold to still it.
“Montana,” she said.
The word came out of her mouth more steady than she felt. She had a sudden, ridiculous urge to laugh.
A whole different country. A child she had never met. A husband she had never met.
“Mrs. Keller,” she said carefully. “I have never raised a child.”
“You raised Brody,” Elsie replied.
“Brody was my brother.”
“He was ten when your mother passed, Zoe Marie. You were fifteen. You raised him.”
Zoe held the paper.
“And what if I do not suit him?” she asked quietly. “This man. What if I cross two thousand miles and arrive on his step and he takes one look at me and decides I will not do?”
“Then,” Elsie said, with a small steady smile, “he will be the second fool in this story, and you will come home and we will find you another door. There is more than one door, Zoe. You are not too old. You are twenty-six.”
Zoe gave a small, wet laugh.
“Two thousand miles, give or take,” Elsie went on, gentler now.
“The mountains are cold, and the people are few, and the Lord is louder out there than He is in New York, in my opinion.” She laid her thin hand over Zoe’s.
“It is a wide country, child. There is room enough out there for one tired soul to find space.”
The bees worked the iris bed. The wren made another opinion known. Somewhere down the road, a wagon rolled by and a man’s voice carried over the orchard, calling to a horse.
Zoe closed her hand around the paper.
“Will you help me write to him, Mrs. Keller?” she asked quietly.
“I have pen, ink, and an empty afternoon,” Elsie replied, getting to her feet. “I came prepared, Zoe Marie.”
The old woman lifted her basket and held out her hand. Zoe took it and rose.
Behind them, in the warm yellow kitchen of her brother’s house, the dough was finishing its rise, alone, untouched, swelling toward a loaf that would feed a stranger at a stranger’s table.
In the apple tree, a robin landed.
It cocked its head at Zoe.
She set her shoulders, which was easier said than done. She walked out of the iris bed beside Mrs. Keller, into the bright June morning, with her mother’s voice in her ear and a stranger’s address folded in her flour-streaked hand.
Stitch by stitch, Zoe Marie. You set the needle, and you go again.
She had a letter to write.