Chapter 1
Cordelia had been in a jail exactly twice in her life, and both visits had been to see Alma Ward.
The first had been four days ago, before she understood what Alma had done.
The second was now. The Cottonwood sheriff's office smelled of pine pitch, and burned coffee, and the iron of the cold stove that nobody had bothered to light.
Alma sat behind the bars at the back of the long room, with her hair coming down, and her hands folded over each other in her lap as though she were waiting at church.
"You came," Alma said.
"Of course I came." Cordelia drew the wooden chair closer to the bars and sat. The deputy at the front desk had taken her gloves and her hatpin and turned a page in his ledger and kept his eyes down. "I'd have come yesterday. They wouldn't let me past the door."
"Sheriff was in a mood."
Alma's wrists, where they folded in her lap, had gone narrow as a girl's. Cordelia's stomach turned over.
"You look thin."
"I am thin." Alma smiled, the same smile Cordelia had been seeing since they were both eleven, standing at the back of the schoolhouse and deciding, with no evidence whatsoever, that they would be best friends for the rest of their natural lives.
"Don't look like that, Cordie. I'm fed. The cell is clean.
Mrs. Boyer brings biscuits in the mornings and pretends she doesn't."
“That’s not a life, though, is it?”
Alma sighed. She looked down at her hands. "I know," she said. "That's the voice you used on me when I told you I had taken your pink ribbon and tied it on my own braid for prayer meeting, and you knew before I said it because you'd already counted the ribbons. You've always counted everything."
"You let him stay."
"I did."
Cordelia's breath went shallow. She made herself ask the rest of it.
"After you knew."
"After I knew."
Cordelia's throat closed. Her fingers curled around the edge of the wooden chair, the wood cold and grained under her palms. The deputy turned another page.
Outside the window a wagon rattled past and a man shouted at the horse, all noise and no edge.
Every sentence she had arranged on the way over had gone out of her the moment she sat down.
"Why?" she said. It came out smaller than she had wanted it to.
"Because I loved him once."
The answer went into Cordelia like cold water. Love was supposed to be the good reason. It was the worst one Alma could have picked.
"Alma, that's no answer."
"It isn't an answer to you." Alma's hands tightened on each other. "It was an answer to me. I'm not asking you to think it was the right one. It wasn't. I'm telling you it was the one I had."
Cordelia closed her eyes. The deputy had stopped turning pages. She did not care.
"I have my ticket," she said. "For Fox Hollow. The train goes Thursday."
"I know."
"I can give it back. I can write to Mr. Barclay and tell him circumstances have changed. He'll understand or he won't, and either way it'll be done."
She hadn't meant to say all of it out loud. She had meant to offer the part of it Alma would accept and to keep the rest for her own pride. Alma's head came up fast.
"No."
"Alma—"
"No, Cordelia." Alma was on her feet at the bars now.
Her hands closed around the iron and her knuckles went white.
"You will get on that train Thursday. You will go to Fox Hollow.
You'll marry your rancher if he's the right kind of man, and you'll write me one letter a month for the rest of my life and I'll read every word twice. "
"I can't leave you here." The bars were close enough to touch. She didn't let herself touch them.
"You can. And you will. Because if you don't, I'll spend whatever time I owe in this county knowing I cost you the only piece of luck a girl like you has ever picked up off the ground.
I would never forgive myself if you missed your chance because of me.
I would never forgive you for letting me. Now sit down."
Cordelia sat. Her hands were shaking and she pressed them flat against her skirt and the shaking went into her knees. She had loved Alma Ward for twelve years and she hadn't, until this minute, understood that loving someone and approving of them were two different things.
"He was guilty," Alma said. Quieter now.
"I knew it when I opened the back room and put the lantern down.
He had taken money from the Pruett brothers' store, and he told me he had taken it before he came under my roof.
I let him stay. Cordie, I wasn't fooled.
He told me plain what he'd done, and I let him stay anyway, because I couldn't stand to put him out in the cold.
That's the sin I'm paying for. It's mine, not yours. "
"It feels like mine."
"That's because you're loyal. It's one of the best things in you, and one of the worst, and I'm telling you to set it down for one minute and pick up your ticket instead."
Cordelia did not answer. She couldn’t.
After a moment, Alma's hands eased on the bars. She sat back down on the bench. She folded her hands again, as though the folding were the last thing she had left that was hers to do.
"Tell me about Rufus Barclay," she said.
Cordelia stared at her.
"Cordie. Tell me about your rancher. Tell me one good thing about him. I want one good thing to carry into supper."
Cordelia swallowed against the burning behind her eyes.
The eighth letter came back to her, the one folded around a pressed sprig of sage from his hillside.
Mr. Barclay had written in his careful round hand that he hoped she wouldn't think him forward for sending it, but that the smell of the country around his ranch might recommend it to her better than his words could.
"He sent me sage," she said.
"There," Alma said. "There you go. Thursday, you take it back to him."
Cordelia didn't say yes. She didn't need to.