Chapter Three
The Pitkin station consisted of a wooden platform, a bench with one broken slat, and a hand-painted sign that read PITKIN in letters so sun-bleached they’d faded to the color of old bone.
Grace stepped off the train and into thin air that pressed against her temples, the like of which she’d never experienced at sea level, and she steadied herself on the platform railing while the world tilted and resettled.
Four days on a train.
Four days of hard wooden seats and stale bread and the endless clatter of wheels on tracks, sleeping upright with her carpetbag clutched to her chest because a woman traveling alone learned quickly to keep her belongings close.
She’d eaten the last of the bread somewhere in Kansas and bought a cup of broth that tasted mostly of hot water from a vendor during the Denver transfer. Her stomach had given up complaining at around the thirtieth hour and settled into a hollow ache that lived just beneath her ribs.
And now this. A platform. A bench. A sign.
Somebody will be waiting for you, Mason’s letter had promised.
She looked left. Right. The platform stretched empty in both directions. The train huffed and groaned behind her, already pulling away, taking with it the only connection she had to anything she’d ever called familiar.
Well. Maybe he was running late. Ranchers had business to tend to and animals to mind. A man couldn’t drop everything the second a train rolled in. So, she set her carpetbag and satchel on the bench, smoothed her travel-rumpled skirt, and sat down to wait.
The sun moved.
A fly landed on her knee. She shooed it. It came back. She shooed it again. Some brown birds she couldn’t name darted between the eaves of the station’s one small building, a ticket office with its window shuttered.
She smoothed her skirt. Checked the letter again, as if the words might’ve rearranged themselves since the last time she’d read them. They hadn’t. Same handwriting. Same promise. Somebody will be waiting for you.
She counted the boards in the platform. Thirty-seven, including the cracked one beneath the bench that wobbled when she shifted her weight.
Thirty-seven boards. No wagon. No rider. No sound on that road except the wind moving through the grass like it owned the whole valley and resented her presence in it.
The thing about growing up where she’d grown up—the docks, the tenements, the men with quick hands and quicker smiles who made promises to girls with nowhere else to go—you learned what a trap looked like.
Not the obvious kind, the back-alley kind, but the slow kind.
The kind with a train ticket and nice handwriting and a destination so far from home that by the time you realized the whole thing stank, you’d already burned every bridge behind you.
She had no return ticket. Seventeen cents in her pocket. No address in this town, no name besides Foster, and, if the Foster ranch turned out to be a lie—or worse, real but unwanting—then she sat on a bench in a territory she couldn’t leave, with less money than it cost to eat.
Girls disappeared this way. She’d seen it in New York. The ones who answered ads, followed promises, boarded trains west, and never wrote home again. Some of them ended up fine. Some of them ended up in places she’d rather gnaw off her own hand than think about right now.
No, actually, it wouldn’t be like that. She was almost entirely sure of it. The girls who disappeared did so immediately. If the Fosters had been planning on selling her somewhere, they’d have already been here with a nice carriage and sweet smiles.
Which meant they’d just abandoned her, and she had no idea why.
Her eyes burned. She pressed the heels of her palms against them. Hard. Because Grace Linton did not cry on public benches in strange towns. She’d made that rule at twelve years old, sitting outside the grocer’s on Fulton Street after the landlord took their stove, and the rule still held.
So, options. She could sit here until dark and see if anyone came.
She could look for a livery station and spend her last cents on a ride to nowhere in particular.
Or she could find the ranch herself, walk straight up to the front door, and demand an explanation from whatever sorry excuse for a man had dragged her four days across the country and left her on a platform without so much as a how-do-you-do?
The third option meant walking. The third option also meant answers, even if the answers turned out to be bad ones, and bad answers beat no answers every single time.
You got tricked, Grace Linton. You got sold a bill of goods by a stranger with nice handwriting and a train ticket, and now you’re sitting on a broken bench in the middle of Nowhere, Colorado, like a fool.
Her throat tightened. The carpetbag sat on her lap, and she gripped the handle the way she’d gripped it on the train, because holding something meant you still had something, and having something meant you hadn’t lost everything yet.
Seventeen cents. One carpetbag. One satchel. One letter from a stranger.
Get up, Gracie. Her mother’s voice, or the memory of it, worn thin from years of replaying. You sit still, you sink. You move, you float. Get up.
The click of a door hinge broke through the quiet.
An older, wiry man emerged from the side of the ticket building with a leather apron and a broom in one hand. He stopped when he caught sight of her, and his bushy eyebrows drew together.
“You been sittin’ there a good long while, miss. You waitin’ on somebody?”
“I’m supposed to be.” She pulled Mason’s letter from her pocket and held it out. “Do you know the Foster ranch? A man named Mason Foster wrote me this and said someone would meet me at the station.”
The worker took the letter, holding it at arm’s length and squinting the way a person did when they needed spectacles and refused to admit it.
“Foster place, sure, sure. I know it well enough. Ain’t but maybe three, four miles up the north road.”
He pointed with the broom handle toward a dirt track that wound away from the station and up into the foothills.
“Follow that road yonder ‘til you hit a creek crossin’, then bear left at the big cottonwood. Can’t rightly miss it, old gal’s been growin’ there since before my granddaddy’s time. You’ll see the fenceline after that. Got a big ol’ iron F hangin’ on the gate.”
Three miles. Maybe four. In travel boots and a wool skirt with two bags, and the sun climbing higher by the minute.
“Ain’t no coach runnin’ out that way? No livery I could hire from?”
“Livery’s in town proper, ‘bout a mile the other direction. But I tell you what, if you’re headed to the Foster place, walkin’s quicker than doublin’ back and hirin’ a rig. It’s an easy road, mostly flat ‘til the last stretch. Nothin’ a healthy gal like yourself can’t handle.”
Grace tucked the letter back into her pocket.
Then she picked up the carpetbag in one hand and slung the satchel across her body and thanked the man, who tipped his cap and went back to whatever he’d been doing inside the ticket office.
She stood at the edge of the platform looking out at three miles of dirt road winding into country she’d never walked before.
Four days on a train. Eleven days of waiting before that. An entire life packed into two bags. And the man couldn’t be bothered to send a wagon.
She stepped off the platform and started walking.
***
She’d never seen so much sky. Back home, sky came in slivers between rooflines and mast tops. Here, it crushed down from every direction, enormous and blue and heavy with the kind of emptiness that could swallow a person whole if she let it.
She almost turned around twice.
The first time, about ten minutes in, when the station disappeared behind a rise and the road ahead stretched long and empty and the blister on her right heel popped and went from hurting to wet.
She stopped. Looked back. The road south led to the station, and the station led to a train, and the train led to New York, and New York led to rats eating her hair on a pillow in a house that leaked in four places.
Not that she had the money for the ticket anyway.
So, she kept walking.
The second time came at the creek crossing, right where the station worker had promised.
A ribbon of water over smooth stones, cold enough when she knelt to splash her face that it made her gasp and clench.
She drank from cupped palms. The water tasted like rocks and snowmelt and absolutely nothing else.
No iron. No rust. No Hudson River silt. Just clean.
And the cleanness of it nearly broke her, because clean water from a creek in Colorado meant she’d actually done it—left everything, everyone, the whole known world—for a man who couldn’t be bothered to send a wagon.
She crouched there with wet hands and a throbbing heel and let the choice sit plain in front of her. Cross or don’t.
She crossed. Soaked one boot on the stones. Bore left at the cottonwood.
From here, the road tilted upward, and, soon enough, just as promised, a fenceline appeared.
Post and rail, rough-hewn timber, running straight and sturdy along the edge of the property in a line so clean it could only belong to a man with a particular way about things. The posts stood evenly spaced, each one planed smooth at the top, and the rails sat snug in their notches.
She followed it uphill until the gate came into view.
Iron, sure enough, with a heavy F forged into the crossbar. Beyond it, the ranch spread out across a grassy bench of land that leveled off against the slope of the foothill behind it.
A proper ranch. A real one. Two-story house, hewn log and clapboard, wide porch running the whole front, stone chimney on the east wall. Outbuildings. Fences. Livestock.
It existed.
The whole walk up, some back corner of her brain had braced for a vacant lot.
A burned-out shack. A sign that said GONE, CONDEMNED, or nothing at all.
But this… this sat solid on the land as if it’d grown there, sturdy and settled and real in a way that knocked the anger sideways and replaced it with something worse.
Because if the ranch existed, then the man existed.
And if the man existed and the ranch looked like this—kept, prosperous, the kind of place a person could build a life in—then he hadn’t tricked her.
He’d just forgotten her. Which meant she’d walked three miles uphill in travel boots to stand at the gate of a man who had everything she’d ever wanted and hadn’t cared enough to meet her at the train.
That stung deeper than a con. A con she could’ve raged against. This just made her small.
It looked solid. Settled. Real.
And from inside the house, muffled but unmistakable, came the sound of men yelling and a baby crying.
Grace stopped at the gate with both bags, pulling at her arms. Sweat plastered her hair to her temples.
The blister on her heel had gone past hurting and into a throb.
She’d walked three miles uphill in travel boots on an empty stomach after four days on a train, and nobody, not a living soul on this entire property, had come to fetch her.
The yelling picked up.
Something crashed. The baby wailed louder, the same way it did through the tenement walls back home, turning into the full-throated howl of an infant who’d been crying long enough to run out of patience and tip over into something wilder.
She pushed through the gate and crossed the yard. The racket on the other side of the door could’ve peeled paint fully.
Two voices, maybe three, talking over each other in the particular cadence of men who’d long since stopped listening to a word the other had to say, and, underneath all of it, the baby screaming itself hoarse.
Something thudded. Glass rattled. One of the voices rose sharply enough to cut through the wall.
She knocked. Hard. Three sharp raps with her knuckles that rattled the door on its hinges.
Nothing. The yelling swallowed the whole sound.
She knocked again. Harder. Put the heel of her palm into it until the wood stung her skin.
The voices stopped. A beat of shuffling.
Heavy boots on floorboards. Then the curtain in the window beside the door twitched, and through the gap she caught a flash of an older man’s face, lined, weathered, and topped with gray hair, peering out at her with the particular squint of someone sizing up a stranger on his property and finding the stranger wanting.
The curtain dropped.
The lock clicked.
The door swung open, and Grace found herself staring straight down the business end of a Winchester rifle.