Chapter Twenty-Five
The idea hit her somewhere between wringing out Thomas’s socks and discovering that Mason had, once again, left a penny in his trouser pocket.
Town.
She could go to town. Right now. This morning. By herself, like an actual grown woman who made decisions without consulting a committee of four men and a rooster.
Miriam kicked her feet on the blanket, babbling at a cloud, doing that thing where her whole body got involved in the babbling, fists pumping, legs kicking, mouth stretching wide open like she had strong opinions about the sky and needed everyone to hear them.
Grace scooped her up, pressed her nose into her neck and—
Yeah. She was going to town.
The men had scattered. Logan rode the south fence with Thomas. Mason and Jonah hammered at whatever had broken this week in the far barn. Rafe worked a strip of leather on the porch, squinting at it as if it had offended him.
Nobody needed her for anything. Not for the next few hours, anyway.
She had to get seeds.
Logan had tilled the garden plot behind the chicken coop last week, split the black dirt open to the sun, and it looked ready, but half the seed packets she’d ordered from the general store catalogue hadn’t come in yet.
However, Mr. Henley had told her last week—through Mason, because, apparently, a woman couldn’t get her own messages in this family—that her pole bean seed and her squash had arrived.
So. Town. Seeds. Maybe a peppermint stick from the jar on Henley’s counter, the ones that tasted like Christmas and cost a penny each. Miriam could gum one of those. Probably.
She hitched Penny to the small cart in about twice the time it should’ve taken, because Penny kept turning her head around to watch with that slightly judgmental expression horses got when they knew you still buckled the traces wrong.
But Grace got it done. Strapped Miriam into the sling, climbed up, and clicked her tongue the way Logan had taught her.
***
Pitkin fit into about four blocks and a church steeple, but after weeks on the ranch, it might as well have been Paris.
People. Actual people she didn’t share a supper table with. A woman in a green dress nodded at her outside the dry goods store. Two boys chased a dog down the main street. Somebody played a fiddle—badly, but still—from an upstairs window above the saloon.
Grace tied Penny at the rail and walked into Henley’s General Store with Miriam on her hip.
The bell above the door chimed. Mrs. Henley looked up from behind the counter and smiled the way women smiled at other women holding babies.
That ‘oh, look at you, you’ve got one too’ look that crossed every line of class and age and didn’t need a single word to work.
“Mrs. Foster! And who’s this little dumpling?”
Nobody in town had ever called her Mrs. Foster before. Her face heated up. Just... warm, all at once, for no good reason.
“This here’s Miriam.”
“Oh, ain’t she precious? She’s got your eyes.”
She didn’t, of course. Miriam’s eyes belonged to whoever had left her in that basket by the fence, some woman Grace had never met and might never meet, and tried not to think about too hard because the thinking led to—
Anyway.
“Thank you.”
Because correcting a compliment about your baby—your baby, yours, not some random woman’s—ranked somewhere below kicking puppies on the list of things a decent person did.
Mr. Henley had her seed packets behind the counter.
Pole beans, summer squash, and he’d thrown in a packet of marigold seed for free, on account of her being new to town and newly married.
It probably also had something to do with Logan buying half the hardware store last week and paying cash for every bit of it.
She browsed. Lord help her, she browsed. Ran her fingers along bolts of fabric. Picked up a tin of beeswax and sniffed it. Found a little wooden horse on the toy shelf, painted red with a crooked tail, and bought it for Miriam with eleven of her seventeen cents.
Miriam grabbed the horse and shoved it directly into her mouth.
Grace chuckled. “That’s the spirit.”
Outside, she dropped onto a bench in the sun and let Miriam chew the horse and watched the town go about its business. A man tipped his hat to her. A girl about six years old stopped to wave at the baby. The fiddle player upstairs switched to a hymn, or tried to, but half the notes landed flat.
An hour slipped past. Then another. Miriam fell asleep in the sling with her mouth open, still gripping the red horse in one fat fist like she’d fight anybody who tried to take it.
Grace had bought the peppermint stick and ate it herself.
***
The commotion reached her before she cleared the front gate.
Hooves. Men shouting. The yard looked like somebody had kicked an anthill.
Thomas cinched a saddle on the bay mare, yanking the girth strap so hard the horse sidestepped.
Mason sprinted from the barn with a lantern in each hand, even though the sun still blazed high and bright.
Jonah gripped three sets of reins by the water trough like he’d forgotten what reins did.
Logan came off the porch in three strides and ran straight to her.
No hat. His shirt hung half-untucked from his trousers—Logan Foster’s shirt hanging half-untucked—and when he reached her, he stopped dead and stared at her.
His eyes went too wide. His color had paled.
The cords in his neck stood out like he’d been mid-shout and couldn’t remember how to stop.
“Grace.”
“Logan, what in the—”
“Where the hell have you been?”
Behind him, Thomas stopped cinching. Mason set the lanterns down. Even the horses went quiet.
“I went to town…” She climbed off the cart. “I needed seeds for the garden, and Mr. Henley had my—”
“You went to town.”
“That’s what I said.”
“By yourself.”
“Well, Miriam came, but she ain’t much for conversation yet, so—”
“This ain’t funny, Grace.”
“I ain’t laughin’, Logan. I went to the general store. I bought seeds. I came back. What is all…” She gestured at the chaos. “This?”
“This is your family gettin’ ready to ride out and search for you because nobody knew where you went!” Logan’s voice cracked on the word family, and he clamped his jaw shut.
Her stomach dropped. “I forgot to leave a—”
“Note? Maybe?”
“Look, Logan, I…” She shifted Miriam higher. “I—it didn’t occur to me. I just—”
“It didn’t occur to you.” He dragged a hand down his face.
“Grace, somebody broke into this house two weeks ago. Somebody dug holes in my pasture. I got a dead heifer and a picked lock and no idea who’s out there, and you just..
. You hitched a cart and rode off with the baby and didn’t tell a livin’ soul where you were goin’? ”
“I was gone three hours!”
“I didn’t know that! I came back to the house, and your room was empty, and the baby’s things were gone, and the cart was gone, and I thought—”
He stopped. Just… stopped and looked away. Like a man who’d run into a wall.
“Logan—”
“I thought somethin’ happened to you.” He shoved the words through his teeth. “Both of you.”
“Logan.” She stepped closer. “I’m here. I’m fine. She’s fine. We’re both fine.”
“This time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you can’t just ride off alone anymore. Not anymore. Not with everything that’s—”
“Can’t?”
Logan flinched a half flinch, like he knew he’d stepped wrong, but his boots had already committed. “Grace, don’t make this into somethin’ it—”
“Then don’t stand there and tell me what I can’t do. I ain’t a horse you get to fence in.”
“Nobody’s corrallin’ you! I’m askin’ you to use common sense!”
“I survived years in a city that’d eat this whole town for breakfast.” She pushed his chest. “I dodged drunks and thieves and rats the size of your boot since before I could read. You wanna talk to me about common sense?”
“New York didn’t have somebody diggin’ holes in your yard and breakin’ into your house in the dead of—”
“New York had plenty of people breakin’ into my house! Every Tuesday, near enough! The difference is I handled it, Logan. I handled it because nobody stood in my way and told me I needed permission to walk out my own front door.”
“I ain’t talkin’ about permission!”
“Then what are you talkin’ about?”
“I’m talkin’ about you bein’ safe!”
Miriam startled in the sling and scrunched into that pre-cry squint that meant they had about four seconds before the world ended. Grace bounced her. Shushed against her hair. Miriam settled. Barely.
Logan dropped his voice. “I’m talkin’ about you and the baby bein’ safe.”
“And I hear you. I do. But Logan, I can’t live locked up. I can’t sit inside these fences day after day waitin’ for you to tell me when it’s all right to breathe. That ain’t livin’. That’s prison with better food.”
“Nobody’s lockin’ you—”
“You just told me I can’t ride to town.”
“You can’t. Not alone. Not right now.”
She frowned. “And when’s that gonna change, Logan?”
“Grace—”
“When? Because it’s been two weeks and you ain’t found a single boot print. Could be months. Could be never. You gonna keep me penned up here ‘til never comes and goes?”
That muscle in his jaw jumped—the one that fired when he clenched his teeth hard enough to crack them. She glanced at that muscle. The calluses on his palms. The scar on his left knuckle. He made the exact sound as before he kissed her, that low half-breath, like he needed to steady himself first.
The man who’d built her a nursery with carved roses and held her under the stars at the pond was standing in front of her, giving orders like she ranked somewhere between the hired help and the livestock.
“I need you to stay on this property, Grace. That’s what I’m tellin’ you.”
“You’re not tellin’ me anything. You’re orderin’ me, as we’ve been doggone repeating over and over again.”
“Call it whatever you want. I ain’t budgin’ on this.”
“Logan—”
“I buried my mother on this property.”
Her breath snagged.
“I buried her because I rode off and left her alone, and somebody came, and she—” His throat moved. “She almost made it to the door. Almost made it. And every day since, I think about that word. Almost. How close she came. How if I’d been here—”
“Logan, that ain’t—”
“So when I come home, and you’re gone, and the baby’s gone, and I don’t know where, and I don’t know why…”
“Ugh! Yes, I understand—”
“I ain’t bein’ overbearing, Grace. I ain’t bein’ paranoid. I’m standin’ in that doorway again. Lookin’ at empty rooms. Runnin’ the same math I been runnin’ for two years. And I can’t do it again. I won’t.”
He said it the way you’d nail a board to a wall. Final. Like he’d already weighed her opinion and set it aside.
And the thing that killed her—the thing that took every argument she had and snuffed them out like fingers on a candle—were his eyes. Those pale blue eyes, catching the late-afternoon sun full on, had gone red-rimmed and glassy and looked at her like she’d already died.
How do you fight that?
How do you stand in front of a man who lost his mother to an empty house and tell him he’s wrong for wanting to keep the doors shut?
“I ain’t your mother, Logan.” She said it more softly than she’d said anything all day. “I ain’t gonna almost make it to the door.”
“Then stay inside the gate. Please.”
But he asked for more than that. That was the trick of it. He’d asked for her freedom and wrapped it in his dead mother’s name, and now she couldn’t say no without feeling like she’d stomped on a grave.
Miriam grabbed a fistful of Grace’s collar.
Grace looked at the yard, Thomas and Mason pretending to be busy with their saddles, Jonah studying the water trough like it held the secrets of the universe, Rafe watching from the porch with his arms crossed and his mouth pressed thin.
“Fine.” The word tasted like swallowing a stone. “I’ll stay.”
Logan’s shoulders dropped an inch. Just an inch. Like a rope going slack.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” She pulled the seed packets off the cart and held them against her chest. “I ain’t doin’ it because I think you’re right. I’m doin’ it because I’m kind and I’m a good wife.”
His mouth opened. Closed. A muscle pulled at the corner of his eye.
But he didn’t take it back. Didn’t say ‘You’re right’ or ‘I’m sorry’ or any of the words that might’ve kept her standing there.
He reached for the seed packets. “Let me carry those.”
“I got ’em.”
“Grace—”
“I said I got ’em.”
She walked past him toward the house, holding Miriam against her chest with one arm and the pole beans, summer squash, and free marigolds with the other.
Behind her, Logan’s boots scuffed the dirt.
He followed. Of course, he followed. The man would follow her into every room of this house for the rest of the summer if that’s what it took to keep her inside his fences.
She climbed the porch steps. Rafe held the door. She thanked him without looking at his face because if there had been pity on it, she’d have broken down right there, and she’d done enough breaking down in front of Foster men for one lifetime.
She set the seed packets on the table.
For a garden she’d plant inside the fence, on a plot Logan had tilled for her, in soil she’d tend on her knees, twenty yards from the back door where Logan could see her from the barn if he turned his head.
Miriam squirmed, and Grace bounced her, and hummed something tuneless into her hair, and tried not to think about the bench in town where she’d sat in the sun for two whole hours eating a peppermint stick like a woman with nowhere to be and no one to answer to.
Someone else would be sitting there right about now anyway.