Chapter One #2
Clara studied her without rushing to answer. She picked up one of the cinnamon cookies, broke it in half, then sampled a bite before giving an approving nod. "My mother still makes these better than anyone in Missouri. It's a pity you're letting them go cold."
Amy drew the quilt around herself more tightly. "I'm serious."
"I know you are." Clara brushed the crumbs from her fingertips and looked at her with quiet sympathy. "I didn't come here planning to defend every man who ever walked the earth. Theodore already ruined their reputation well enough."
Amy's gaze drifted back to the ceiling. "He lied every time he smiled at me. He made me believe my whole future was waiting in Brook Hollow." Amy swallowed hard. "I gave him everything I had."
"And he proved he wasn't worthy of it." Clara rested an elbow on the arm of her chair. "You've always wanted to see more than St. Joseph."
Amy's gaze drifted toward the window. Once, she'd spent quiet moments imagining trains bound for places she'd only read about. Those dreams felt childish now. "I used to."
"That dream didn't disappear. It just collided with the wrong fellow."
Amy let out a tired sigh. "I mistook foolishness for hope."
Clara watched her another few seconds before reaching for the remaining half of the cookie. "You know what worries me?"
Amy glanced at her.
"You've stopped arguing with me."
"I've argued plenty,” Amy insisted.
"You've corrected my grammar twice in the past three months, informed me that I've been shelving history beside geography since Easter, and once delivered an entire lecture about why adventure novels deserve better endings. Today you've barely managed a complaint."
The corner of Amy's mouth twitched despite herself. That faint smile lasted only a heartbeat before the weight in her chest pulled it away again. "I don't feel much like lecturing anyone."
"I noticed." Clara smiled to herself. "Actually, I've been thinking about Mrs. Henderson's cousin."
Amy frowned. "The one who moved west?"
"The very one. She wrote another letter last month while you were helping old Mr. Lewis hunt for that dictionary he insisted had vanished."
Amy remembered the afternoon well enough. "He found it."
"Exactly where you told him it would be.
" Clara settled deeper into her chair. "According to her letter, the town keeps growing faster than anyone expected.
Families arrive every week, shops need clerks, the school needs a teacher, and nobody seems to care where a person came from as long as they're willing to work. "
"I'm glad she's happy." Amy waited, watching Clara with growing suspicion. Her friend hadn't spent the last few minutes talking about a stranger simply to admire someone else's good fortune. "Why are you telling me this?"
Clara looked at Amy pointedly. "Because she began again."
Amy watched a patch of sunlight creep across the floorboards as her pulse picked up. "I wouldn't know how to start such a thing."
"You'd begin the same way everyone else does."
Amy looked at her. "How?"
"One choice at a time."
"I don't have the money." Amy gave a weary shake of her head. "And I've never done anything except work in the library."
"You've helped run that library for years, looking after everyone who walks through its doors. You don't even realize how many people depend on you." Clara smiled. "Employers usually appreciate useful people."
Amy let out a quiet breath. "You make it sound easy." Silence settled between them while Amy studied the worn quilt across her knees. "I don't belong anywhere else."
Clara leaned back in her chair. "How would you know? You've spent your whole life here. You've dreamt about traveling often enough. Half the novels you recommended ended with somebody climbing onto a train or a wagon because staying where they were would've been the real tragedy."
Amy couldn't argue with that.
Clara's smile softened. "Theodore has already taken enough from you, Amy. I'd hate to see him steal the years you haven't lived yet. So I want you to consider one idea."
Amy watched as Clara unfolded the pages and searched several columns before turning the paper toward her. "I've been collecting these advertisements."
She frowned. "Advertisements for what?"
Clara tapped a notice printed near the bottom of the page. Respectable Rancher Seeking Wife.
Amy read one advertisement after another. They came from farmers, shopkeepers, widowers, and blacksmiths, each describing a different town and a different life. Yet they all seemed to ask the same question: Would the reader leave one future behind to build another?
She looked back at Clara, uncertain whether to laugh or fold the newspaper shut. Amy scanned the advertisements once more before lifting her eyes to Clara. "You can't honestly expect me to answer one of these."
"I'd never waste a newspaper on a joke."
A short laugh escaped Amy. "I believe you've finally lost your senses. Mail-order brides?"
"They've become fairly common." Clara saw the disbelief written across Amy's face. She smiled gently and reached across the narrow space between them, giving Amy's hand a reassuring squeeze. "Hear me out."
"I thought only desperate women agreed to such arrangements."
"I've heard of widows, schoolteachers, farmers' daughters, and one stubborn baker who married a rancher because she claimed city life bored her to tears." Clara shrugged. "People leave home for all sorts of reasons."
Amy folded the edge of the newspaper between her fingers. "I've just told youI'll never trust another man, and your solution is to send me halfway across the country to marry one I've never met?"
"My solution is to remind you that Brook Hollow isn't the only place outside St. Joseph."
Amy gave the paper back. "I couldn't." Yet her gaze drifted back to the newspaper.
Each advertisement held only a few lines. A name. An occupation. A town she had never heard of. A promise that honest work and a home that waited somewhere beyond Missouri. The whole idea sounded impossible, yet it carried her thoughts farther than they'd wandered since Clara had brought her home.
"I've never traveled farther than Brook Hollow."
"You were willing to leave it all behind for Theodore." Clara cocked her head to one side. “You were excited for the adventure.”
Amy managed a faint smile. "That one journey taught me plenty."
"It taught you one man couldn't be trusted. It didn't teach you the whole world belonged in the same basket."
Amy traced the edge of the folded paper with her fingertip. "I don't know whether I'm brave enough."
"I don't think bravery has much to do with it." Clara rose from her chair, slipped the newspaper onto the bedside table beside the untouched biscuits, and gathered her satchel before smoothing her skirt.
Amy watched her friend cross the room, then gazed at the folded newspaper again. She couldn't imagine answering one of those advertisements. The very idea bordered on absurd. "I don't need this," she insisted.
“We shall see.” Clara smiled as she reached the door. "You once spent half an afternoon reading an advertisement for a patent for a potato peeler because the fellow who wrote it had dreadful grammar. Curiosity has always been your greatest weakness."
Amy almost laughed. "I was judging his punctuation."
Clara rested her hand on the doorknob. "I'll come back tomorrow. If those pages are still folded, I'll carry them home again without another word."
After the door closed behind her, the room settled into silence once more.
Amy lay still, watching sunlight creep across the bedside table until it reached the folded newspaper.
She told herself Clara had wasted the trip.
The advertisements belonged in yesterday's fire, and no sensible woman would ever answer one.
But her curiosity lingered.
Before the afternoon slipped away, Amy reached across the table, unfolded the paper, and began reading the first advertisement.