Chapter Thirty-One
The back door banged shut in Grace’s face. Miriam jerked against her chest and let out a startled squawk, and Grace just stood there for a second with her hand on the latch and her pulse thrumming so hard it shook her teeth.
Then she shoved the door open and went after him.
Jonah moved fast for a man who’d taken a beating like that.
He was already past the chicken coop and cutting toward the bunkhouse with his head ducked, and his shoulders pulled up tight.
Gerald flapped off his perch and let out one of those gargled war cries that meant he’d spotted movement, but even he seemed to reconsider, because Jonah looked like the kind of thing you just let walk past.
“Jonah!”
He kept going.
“Jonah Linton, you stop walkin’ right now, or I swear to God—”
He stopped. Stood with his back to her about ten yards from the bunkhouse door. His shoulders hitched up, then dropped, and the shape of him against the fading light looked smaller than she’d ever—
Sure, he’d always been thin, even as kids. Even when Mama still fried dough on Sundays, and Papa brought home salt cod from the docks, Jonah ran lean. But this kind of small had nothing to do with ribs or shoulders. This came from somewhere else.
“You don’t even have your things.” Grace caught up to him with Miriam bouncing on her hip and her voice coming out ragged because she’d half-run the distance in boots she’d tied too tightly. “You were just gonna walk off into the dark without your coat? Without your—”
“I got my boots and my legs, Gracie. That’s more than I started with.”
“That’s not—you can’t just—”
She grabbed his arm and yanked. In the last of the daylight, the bruising around his eye had gone from purple to something darker, almost black, and the gash above his brow had started to crust over in a thick, uneven line.
Mama would’ve had a fit. Would’ve sat him down, pressed a cloth soaked in vinegar against it, and scolded him in two languages while forcing broth down his throat, because broth and scolding had been Mama’s answer to everything.
But Mama had died on a cot that smelled like sulfur and lye, and nobody had made broth since.
“Explain it to me.” Grace planted herself in front of him. “All of it. And don’t you dare leave out a single thing, because what you just told Logan tore my whole life open.”
“I ain’t got nothin’ else to say, Grace.”
“Don’t give me that. You stood in our kitchen back in New York and put that ad in my hand and said this could be somethin’ good for us, and I believed you.”
Jonah’s jaw worked side to side. The swelling in his lip made his whole mouth crooked, and he kept running his tongue along the split. He’d done the same thing as a kid whenever Papa caught him in a lie, tongued his lip like the truth might be hiding behind his teeth.
“It is good… for you.” His voice came out hoarse. “Look at this place, Gracie. Look at the house, the baby, the—”
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you stand there and dress this up as if you did me a favor.”
“I’m not—”
“You used me.” The word tasted like copper, like biting the inside of her cheek so hard it bled. “You handed me to a criminal like a skeleton key and smiled while you did it.”
Jonah flinched.
“I didn’t want to.”
“Oh, that’s a relief.”
“You gotta believe me, I fought him on it. I told Ace to find another way, to leave you out of it, and he—” He dragged his hand down his face, pulling the gash open again. “He said he’d kill you.”
“Oh, Jonah, tell me you didn’t believe—”
“You ain’t seen what he does to people who tell him no.”
Miriam started fussing again, groping for Grace’s collar and catching a fistful of fabric instead, pulling at it with that angry little grip she got when she needed something but hadn’t figured out what yet.
“So you sacrificed me instead.”
“I sacrificed myself.” Jonah’s good eye burned wet and red. “Every day I sat at that table and ate with them and laughed with them and held that baby, I—”
“Don’t you say it, Jonah.”
“I love this family, Gracie.” He pressed his palm over his mouth. “I love ’em like they’re mine. And I ruined it because I’m too much of a coward to—”
“You ain’t a coward.”
Damn her for saying it; he sure didn’t deserve comfort right now.
But Jonah had starved himself for her. Back in that freezing box off the Hudson, he’d given her his portion and pretended he’d already eaten, and she’d believed him because the alternative meant her brother had gone hungry so she could eat.
“You’re a lot of things, Jonah Linton. A liar and a thief and a damn fool, but you ain’t a coward.”
“Tell that to your husband.”
Logan.
The name dropped through her chest like a stone into a well, and it just kept dropping. Down through her ribs and her belly and the backs of her knees, and she sat down on the ground because her legs had given up on the project of holding her upright.
Logan’s face when he said, ‘You knew.’ That flatness. Like somebody had taken a rag and wiped everything off—the warmth, the humor, the way his eyes creased at the corners when she made him laugh, all of it—just gone. Blank as a chalkboard after the teacher’s done.
“He’ll never trust me again.”
As much as she would have rather not said it, because saying it made it real, she had to. Because it’s true.
“He thinks I tricked him, Jonah. He thinks—” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, and Miriam grabbed at the tears like they might be something edible. “He thinks the letter I wrote, the things I said about family, about holding things together—he thinks it all came from Ace.”
“I’m sorry…”
“I meant every word. I meant every goddamn word, and now he’ll never—”
“Gracie…” Jonah lowered himself down beside her. “He’ll come around. I promise.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
“Because he loves you.” Jonah smiled. “Even I can see that, and I’m thick as a brick.”
“You’re thicker than a brick.”
“Fair.”
“A brick’s got more sense.”
“Also fair.”
Grace pressed her forehead against Miriam’s and breathed in the baby’s smell, that strange, sweet musk babies had—warm milk, a little bit of drool, and under all of it, Logan’s soap, because she’d been bathing Miriam with his soap since the second week.
Everything in that house smelled like Logan.
The shirts, the blankets, the baby, Grace herself.
The man had soaked into every corner of her life without asking.
“You need to go.” She lifted her head. “I’ll try to change his mind, but, for now, you need to go.”
“I ain’t leavin’ you alone when you’re so—”
“I ain’t alone. I got Rafe, I got the boys, and I got Miriam. And right now, you standin’ here gives Logan one more reason to shut me out, so you need to go.”
Jonah stared at her with that look he’d had since they’d crouched behind the tenement as kids sharing a stolen apple, the one saying, “we’re all we’ve got.”
But Grace had someone else now.
“I’ll be in town.” He stood up. “At the boardin’ house on Main, if they’ll let me work for my stay. If not, I’ll—”
“Just go, Jonah.”
He leaned down and kissed the top of Miriam’s head. The baby grabbed at his collar—that same fistful grip she used on everyone she loved—and Jonah unhooked her tiny fingers one at a time and pressed his lips together hard enough to turn them white at the edges.
“I’m sorry, Gracie. I know that don’t fix it. But I’m sorry.”
He walked away.
Miriam whimpered.
“I know, baby girl.” Grace bounced her. “I know.”
***
The house had gone quiet by the time she crept back inside. Rafe had left a plate of bread and cold beef on the counter with a towel over it. Logan had shut his door, but a thin line of lamplight leaked under the gap, and the scratch of a pencil on paper came through the wood.
Ledger work. Which meant Logan had retreated into numbers, which meant he’d rather count cattle losses than look at her.
Grace fed Miriam the last of the evening bottle and rocked her in the nursery, in the crib with the carved roses, in the room Logan had built for them, and every inch of it pressed against her ribs like a bruise that kept getting thumbed.
He’d come after her the first time. Ridden out before dawn, knelt in the dirt, built a fire, brought biscuits.
He wouldn’t come this time.
Miriam’s breathing deepened against Grace’s chest. Grace lowered her into the crib and tucked the blanket around her and stood there with her hands on the rail, tracing one of the carved roses.
Five petals.
The fifty dollars sat crumpled in her dress pocket. She pulled the bills out and smoothed them flat on the changing table. Back in New York, fifty dollars bought six months of rent, or a conversation with a man who ran pickpockets for a living.
Ace wanted the loot. The loot lived somewhere under the ranch property. Ace had torn the place apart looking for it and come up empty. He’d beaten Jonah half to death. He’d threatened Grace’s life.
And he’d come back.
Men like Ace always came back. She’d grown up among them—the dock bosses, the ward runners, the landlords who collected rent at knifepoint—and every single one of them operated on the same oily clockwork. Want, take, wait, come back for more.
You didn’t beat a man like that by building a bigger fence. Logan could put iron grates on every window and ride every fenceline from sunup to sundown, and Ace would just wait. Patient as a rat in a wall. Grace had plenty of experience with rats. They chewed and chewed until something gave.
Unless you took away the cheese.
Fifty dollars. To Ace Pike, who’d spent his life squeezing nickels out of children’s pockets, fifty dollars meant something.
Maybe not enough to buy him off forever, but enough to get a meeting.
Enough to walk in and say, “Leave this family alone, and I’ll help you find what you’re looking for, or take the money and go, but either way you’re done threatening the people I love. ”
Stupid plan. Half a plan. Quarter of a plan, honestly, held together with spit and hope and the same stubborn bullheaded refusal to sit still that had gotten her chased off a horse two weeks ago.
But sitting still had never saved her from anything. Not in the tenement, not at the docks, and not in the freezing little room where she’d waited for Jonah to come home with money. She hadn’t asked where it came from because asking meant knowing and knowing meant…
Anyway.
Grace pulled the pencil from the kitchen drawer. She tore a page from the back of Logan’s receipt pad—he’d notice that—and sat down at the dining table.
Logan,
I’ve gone to find Ace. Don’t come after me.
Jonah is my brother, which makes this my mess to clean up.
The only reason that man has any hold on this family is because of me, whether I knew it or not.
I’m taking my fifty dollars because it’s mine, and you said so yourself, and I aim to use it to make him leave.
Tell Miriam I’ll be back.
She stopped writing. The pencil hovered over the paper, and the clock on the mantel ticked, and upstairs, the pencil had stopped scratching, which meant Logan had either fallen asleep over his numbers or given up on them.
I meant every word of that letter. The one I wrote from New York. Nobody told me what to say. Not Jonah, not Ace, not a single soul. I wrote it at the kitchen table with a pencil just like this one, and I meant it.
I still mean it.
Grace
She folded the note once, creased it with her thumbnail the way Mama used to crease the letters she sent back to the old country, and left it propped against the salt cellar in the center of the table where Logan would find it first thing, because that man salted his eggs before he even cooked them, which had driven her crazy the first week and now—
Right.
She laced her boots tight, double knots, the way she’d done at the fair after Logan told her to, and pulled on her coat.
The fifty dollars went into the inside pocket, right against her ribs.
Mormor’s wooden rose brooch sat on the hallway shelf.
She pinned it to the inside of her collar, where it pressed against her throat, because her grandmother had carried that brooch across an ocean sewn into the hem of her dress, and Grace needed that kind of courage pressed against her skin tonight.
The front door opened without a sound. Logan had oiled the hinges last week, because of course he had, and Grace stepped through into the cold night air and pulled the door shut behind her.
The road stretched out toward town in the moonlight, pale dirt and dark fence posts, and the cottonwood tree standing like a crooked finger against the sky.
Three miles, maybe four. She’d walked it once before, the day she’d arrived, with a popped blister and seventeen cents and a burning in her chest so hot it had carried her all the way to the gate.
Lord only knew where the bandits were hiding, but, if they had as much of a lookout on the house as Jonah had said, someone would notice her walking sooner or later.
Someone would come get her and take her to Ace.
The gravel crunched under her boots. Somewhere behind her, Gerald shifted on his perch and let out one low, questioning cluck.
“Mind your business, Gerald.”