Chapter Twelve
Logan split a log clean down the center and drove the axe into the stump before the halves hit the ground.
Good.
Another one. He grabbed a round from the pile, set it on the stump, and swung. The blade bit through the grain, and the wood popped apart with a crack that echoed off the barn wall. He kicked the halves aside and reached for the next because, if he stopped chopping, his hands would go idle.
Idle hands led to idle thinking, and that ran to that road curving behind the cottonwoods, where three people had gotten smaller and smaller until the bend had swallowed them whole.
So, he chopped.
The morning sun climbed past the ridge and poured across the yard, and the flower beds along the porch held their stubborn roses in a row of green that nobody would water today.
Or tomorrow. Or however long it took for the blooms to figure out the woman who’d saved them had walked off down a dirt road wearing Logan’s shirt.
His shirt.
She’d taken his good flannel too, the one with the pearl snaps he’d replaced by hand last winter because the originals had cracked.
She hadn’t even had the courtesy to grab one of the old ones from the rag pile.
Just swiped the best one off the hook like it belonged to her, which it did not, on account of nothing in this house belonging to her.
She’d made that clear enough by leaving.
He swung the axe, and the log split crooked, one half flying wide and skipping across the dirt toward the chicken coop.
Fine. Crooked split. Happens.
Behind him, the screen door whined on its hinges.
“You been at that woodpile since she left.” Thomas leaned against the porch rail. “We got enough firewood to last through next winter and the one after.”
“Ranch always needs firewood.”
“Ranch needs a lot of things right now, and none of ’em involve you beatin’ logs to death.”
Logan set another round on the stump. “Go check the south fence.”
“South fence is fine. I checked it yesterday.”
“Then check it again.”
Thomas came down the steps and crossed the yard with that loose stride of his, the one that meant he planned to say something Logan wouldn’t like and had already decided he didn’t care about the consequences.
“She didn’t betray you, Logan.”
The axe stopped mid-swing. Not because of Thomas’s ill-timed words, but because the muscle in Logan’s shoulder seized from swinging for two hours straight without rest, and the pain shot from his neck down to his elbow.
He lowered the axe and pressed his thumb into the knot above his collarbone.
“She took the baby.”
“She took the baby because you told her to leave. What’d you expect her to do, set Miriam on the porch like a jug of milk?”
“I expected her to act like a reasonable person and understand that I can’t just let strangers waltz onto my land without so much as a how-do-you-do.”
“Her brother, Logan. Her only kin.”
“A brother I never met, never vetted, who showed up in the dark like a thief.”
Thomas rubbed the back of his neck. “You tackled him before he could open his mouth.”
“He stood on my porch at five in the mornin’.”
“So does the rooster, and you ain’t wrestled him into the dirt yet.”
Logan drove the axe into the stump and left it there. The handle vibrated once and went still, and he stared at it rather than look at his brother, because looking at his brother meant seeing that expression Thomas got when he’d figured out something Logan hadn’t.
“She chose him.” Logan wiped his palms on his trousers. “I gave her a home. And the second her brother showed up, she picked his side without blinkin’.”
“You asked her to choose.”
“I did not.”
“You told her brother to get off your property and then told her she could leave if she didn’t like it. What do you call that if it ain’t a choice?”
From inside the house, Mason’s voice carried through the open window as he talked to Pa about something Logan couldn’t make out. The mantel clock ticked between their words, and every tick drilled a small hole in Logan’s skull.
“She used us, Thomas. Came out here playin’ the sweet caretaker, gettin’ us all attached to that baby, makin’ Pa smile again, and the whole time she had one foot out the door.”
Thomas stared at him. “You don’t believe a word of that.”
Logan picked up a split log and tossed it onto the pile. Then another. Stacking them tight the way he always did, bark side out, ends flush.
“You’re stackin’ angry.” Thomas crossed his arms. “The logs are crooked.”
“The logs are fine.”
“They ain’t. And neither are you. And Grace didn’t use nobody, and you know it, because a woman who sews a bonnet out of a flour sack for a baby that ain’t even hers don’t got one foot out the door. She’s got both feet planted, and you yanked the floor out from under her.”
Alright.
Put that way, with the flour-sack detail thrown in like salt on a cut, the anger he’d been nursing all day lost its footing.
What replaced it was worse. He thought of Grace’s face when he’d said those words to her, the way she hadn’t crumbled the way he expected, the way she’d just gone quiet and done it.
Packed up the baby and walked out like she’d been waiting for him to prove her right about something she’d been afraid of all along.
He grabbed the axe and wrenched it free from the stump.
“I’m gonna finish this woodpile. Then I’m gonna check the feed stores. Then I’m gonna ride the far fenceline. And I’d appreciate it if everybody in this house stopped tryin’ to tell me how to run my own ranch.”
Thomas held up both palms and backed toward the porch. “Sure thing, boss. You just go on choppin’ wood in the sun while your wife sleeps in a ditch somewhere. Real solid plan.”
The screen door banged shut behind him.
He’d been wrong. He knew it the way you knew a bone was broken before the doctor told you.
Grace loved his family. She loved Miriam.
And somewhere in the mess of it, somewhere he hadn’t been brave enough to look straight at, she might have been starting to warm up to him, too. And he’d sent her away.
Logan swung the axe.
***
Pa cooked supper.
That alone should’ve served as punishment enough for whatever sins Logan had committed, because Rafe Foster’s culinary skills began and ended with boiling water, and he even managed to scorch it somehow.
The kitchen filled with a smell that sat somewhere between burnt cornmeal and wet saddle leather, and the pot on the stove held a gray substance Pa called stew, but which bore a closer resemblance to wallpaper paste.
The four of them sat around the table.
Logan in his chair. Pa at the head. Mason on the left, Thomas on the right. Grace’s chair between Mason and the dresser-drawer sat empty, and the drawer itself did too, and those two vacant spots punched holes in the room that no amount of gray stew could fill.
Nobody spoke for the first five minutes.
Mason pushed his spoon through the bowl and lifted it. The stew clung to the metal in a glob that defied gravity for a full second before dropping back with a sound like a boot pulling free of mud.
“Pa,” Mason set the spoon down. “What’d you put in this?”
“Beef. Potatoes. Onion. Salt.”
“In what order?”
“All at once.”
Thomas closed his eyes.
Logan picked up his spoon and put it back down.
His stomach had cinched itself shut about three hours ago and showed no signs of opening.
Not because of the stew—though it had provided ample reason on its own—but because, every time he lifted the spoon, the motion pulled his gaze past the empty chair to the hook by the door, where Grace’s apron still hung.
She’s out there right now.
Out there, meaning somewhere between here and town, with no money, no provisions, a baby who needed milk every four hours, her brother—whom Logan had known for approximately ninety seconds before putting him in the dirt—and whatever that threadbare rucksack held, which couldn’t amount to much based on the size of it.
Colorado nights dropped below freezing this time of year once the sun went down.
Even in spring. The altitude did something to the air that turned warm afternoons into bitter dark in the span of an hour, and Grace had come from sea level in New York and still got dizzy from the thin air after three weeks.
He shoved his bowl to the center of the table.
“I ain’t hungry.”
Pa looked up from his own untouched stew. “Eat.”
“I said I ain’t—”
“And I said, ‘Eat.’ A man who won’t feed himself ain’t fit to make decisions about nothin’ else.”
Logan pulled the bowl back and forced a spoonful down. The stew tasted the way the kitchen smelled, and he swallowed it without chewing because chewing would only prolong the experience.
Mason cleared his throat. “Got somethin’ for you.”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, creased and soft from handling. He set it on the table and slid it across to Logan.
Logan picked it up. Unfolded it.
The handwriting ran small and careful, with the letters pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the paper, the way someone wrote when they bore down on every word because each one cost them something.
Grace’s letter.
Logan read it twice.
Then he folded the letter along its original creases and pressed his thumb over the center fold, where the paper had gone soft from being opened and closed too many times.
“We got thirty-two responses to that ad.” Mason leaned forward. “Thirty-two women. Some of ’em claimed to be real pretty. Some had money. One gal’s father offered to throw in forty head of cattle as a dowry.”
Thomas clicked his tongue. “Forty head, Logan.”
“And we picked Grace.” Mason tapped the table.
“Thomas and I read every letter, and we picked her. Not because of what she could do for us. Because of what she said about family. Because she wrote that letter like she meant every word down to the ink stains, and you could tell she’d gone over it half a dozen times makin’ sure she got it right. ”
Logan stared at the folded paper in his hands.
“She loves this family, Logan.” Mason leaned forward. “Lord knows why, but she does.”
“And you sent her packin’.” Thomas raised his chin. “Told her she ranked somewhere between the hired help and a piece of furniture and then dared her to walk.”
“I—”
“No. No excuses. That woman’s got more spine than any three men in this county, and you backed her into a corner where stayin’ meant agreein’ she don’t matter.”
The clock ticked.
Pa set his spoon down and pushed his chair back from the table.
The legs scraped the floor, and he braced both hands on the armrests and looked at Logan with those eyes that had gone flinty over the years, worn down to something harder than the original material, the way river rock smoothed into iron.
“Your mother, God rest her, walked out on me once.”
All three brothers turned.
“Packed a bag and went to her sister’s in Gunnison for a whole week. You boys don’t remember on account of Logan bein’ only four and the rest of you weren’t born yet. I’d said somethin’ bull-headed, same as you did this mornin’. Told her my word ran final under my own roof.”
Logan breathed faster.
“She looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘Rafe Foster, a roof ain’t a home unless the people under it got a voice, and I will not raise my children in a house where mine don’t count.
’” Pa worked his jaw under that mustache.
“Longest week of my whole life. I rode to Gunnison with my hat in my hand, and I begged that woman to come back.”
“Pa—”
“Don’t Pa me, boy.” Rafe pointed one thick finger at him. “You got your mother’s stubbornness and my pride, and Lord help you, that’s a combination that’ll burn a man’s life down around his ears if he don’t get a handle on it.”
Logan pressed both palms flat on the table. The letter sat between his hands, and Grace’s handwriting bled through the thin paper in reverse, all those careful letters showing backward through the page.
I will not just keep your house. I will make it a home.
And she had.
She’d walked into a house full of men who’d locked themselves away from the world, and she’d cracked every window open.
He unfolded the letter one more time.
Read the last line.
I would give anything to belong to a family again.
And he’d told her she could leave.
Logan pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes until the pressure bloomed white.
He missed her. God help him, he missed her.
The house didn’t smell right without her cooking in it.
The baby wouldn’t stop crying for anyone else.
And he kept catching himself listening for her footsteps in the hall like a man who’d lost something he didn’t have the right to grieve.
“It’s late tonight.” He dropped his hands. “First light, I’ll ride out.”
Mason slumped back in his chair. Thomas blew out a breath.
Pa picked up his spoon and took a bite of stew, grimaced, and set it back down.
“Lord Almighty, that’s terrible.”