Chapter Two
Madera Canyon, Arizona
Two years was a long time.
More than long enough to stop expecting the sound of hoofbeats on the track. Long enough, she had told herself on more than one occasion, to stop thinking about Thomas McBride altogether.
She had not quite managed that last part. And today was particularly bad; her thoughts kept snagging on the memory of him, like her dress catching on thorns.
It was the date that did it. The twenty-first of June had a way of arriving whether she was ready for it or not.
This was her second wedding anniversary, or what would have been her wedding anniversary, and it stung just as badly as the first. The rest of the year, she could keep herself busy enough.
Keep the memories at bay. But today they followed her everywhere, patient and relentless, the way shadows follow a person in the late afternoon sun.
She hoisted the water pail and crossed the yard toward the chicken coop, her boots scuffing the dry red dirt.
The hens were restless this morning, clustering and shifting against each other.
It made her uneasy. She had grown up on a ranch and had learned one lesson early—when it came to weather, animals always knew first. There was a storm brewing, she thought, even if the sky looked clear enough for now.
Two years, she thought, scattering feed with a practiced flick of her wrist. Two years today.
She had waited for a man who had no intention of coming. A man who had never thought her worth the courtesy of an explanation, though she had been half waiting for one every day since.
***
There had been rumors, of course. There always were, in a town as small as Madera Canyon. Everyone knew everyone else’s business and thought it was their right to pass judgment.
She had heard them only in fragments at first—a word here, an exchanged glance there, conversations that stopped when she walked into a room.
It had taken several months before someone finally told her the truth outright, and that someone had been Martha Greer, who had never quite mastered the art of kindness or tact when it came to delicate matters.
Thomas had not left her for nothing. There had been no misunderstanding or mistake. No accident or change of fortune. No excuse, in other words.
He had left her for someone else. A woman from a wealthy family on the other side of the state, older than him by nearly a decade, with money and land and connections that his own ambitious family had been cultivating quietly for years, though that was news to Hazel.
A better match. A more profitable one. Apparently, he had weighed what he had with Hazel, their friendship, the years of easy laughter, the love she had believed in so completely.
He had found it wanting against an important name and a full bank account.
She had not cried when she heard that. She had thought she might, braced herself for it, but instead she had gone very still and very quiet and felt something change inside her. If she had had to explain it, she would have said it was like a door closing.
The worst of it wasn’t the betrayal. Or rather, it wasn’t only the betrayal.
The worst of it was what it said about her own judgment.
She had known Thomas her entire life. She had watched him grow from a freckled, gap-toothed boy into a man she believed she knew and understood inside and out.
She had looked at him and thought, This is someone who would never hurt me.
She had trusted that more than she had trusted almost anything else in the world. She had gone on waiting at the altar and for months afterward, certain he would come and explain a mistake, a misunderstanding. Because she believed that he was good.
And she had been entirely wrong. Catastrophically so.
That was the thing she couldn’t forgive herself for. The thing she couldn’t let herself forget. Not for loving him, not even for losing him. For not seeing it.
***
Her father was usually right about the ranch, even now, when he was slowing down.
His health had been failing for the better part of a year, though he would not say so in as many words.
James Fitzgerald had never been a man who complained.
Once, when she was little, he’d fallen from a hayloft and dislocated his shoulder; one of the hands had jerked it back into place and he’d just gone on working.
He was that sort of man, the sort who got on with things.
But she could see that he was moving more carefully, that he rested in the chair after dinner in a way he never used to.
Often, he dozed off. She had taken on more and more of the heavy work without either of them saying anything about it.
Because if they said anything about it, that would make it real, make it true.
She looked toward the house.
He was moving across the yard now with the slow, careful gait that had become familiar.
He was carrying a coil of rope that he probably shouldn’t have been carrying, one hand pressed briefly to his chest before he dropped it again and straightened with visible and deliberate effort. She watched him do it.
“I can take that,” she called.
“I’ve got it.” He waved her off without looking up.
She let him have it. He needed to be useful. Taking that away would hurt him more than the rope weighed.
But she watched him, ready to step in if she was needed. She always watched him now.
***
The sky had been changing since morning.
She had noticed it first around nine o’clock.
The air seemed to thicken; something charged was settling over the hills to the west. By midday, the light had lost its clean summer brightness and had taken on instead a flat, yellowish quality.
It made the landscape look almost painted.
The hens were still unsettled. The horses had moved to the far corner of their paddock, where they clustered together.
Storm coming, she thought again. And not a small one.
Her mind was spinning, running through a list of what needed to be done, what needed to be secured before the winds rose.
The wind picked up as if to remind her she was already running behind.
“Pa.” She raised her voice across the yard. “Storm’s coming in fast. We need to get the shed doors done.”
Something crossed his face—the familiar assessing look. “Shed doors and the paddock gate,” he called back. “I’ll take the gate.”
“I’ll do the equipment shed first, then come and help—” she replied.
But the wind swallowed the end of her sentence, and he was already moving, and the sky was pressing down low and bruised above them.
***
It came faster than either of them expected.
That was the thing about storms out here.
They could move with a speed that caught you off guard, no matter how many times you’d seen their like, no matter how good you were at reading the signs.
One minute the air was thick and still and pregnant with warning.
The next, the wind arrived in force, bending the mesquite sideways and lifting great rolling walls of red dust off the ground.
The temperature dropped ten degrees in minutes.
The light went from yellow to a dark purplish-gray.
And then the storm was upon you, and there was nothing left to do except take cover and wait it out.
Hazel fought her way to the equipment shed, one arm raised against the rising wall of dust, her red hair tearing loose from its braid and whipping across her face.
The latch was stiff, just as she’d known it would be, and she wrestled with it in the wind, her fingers slipping, the door slamming back against her shoulder hard enough to bruise. She got it secured. She turned.
“Pa!”
She could barely see across the yard. The dust was too thick, churning and billowing in great reddish curtains, the sky above it entirely gone. She pressed forward, one hand out in front of her, calling for him, and the wind took her voice and flung it away.
Thunder went off somewhere behind the dust, and she counted without meaning to. One. Two.
She found him at the north fence.
He had made it that far and stopped, one hand gripping the top rail, the other pressed against his chest. His hat was gone. His face was gray, and his breathing was labored. As she leaned close to him, she could hear it even over the noise of the storm.
“Come on.” She got her arm around him, pulling his weight against her side. “Come on, let’s get inside, come on—”
He moved with her, leaning heavily, and she took every ounce of his weight without complaint or pause, her legs pushing against the force of the wind, her eyes half shut against the stinging dust. They had gone a few yards from the fence when she heard it.
And then there was no time—no time to duck.
She went down hard.
The ground came up to meet her, and then there was nothing. Nothing but a vast and sudden darkness that swallowed her whole.
***
When the darkness began to thin, it did so slowly, like dispersing smoke. There was pain first, a throbbing pain above her left eye that pulsed with every heartbeat. When she finally opened her eyes, the light was dazzling.
She was lying on her side in the dirt. How had she gotten there?
That’s right. There had been a storm. It had come on so fast.
The storm had passed.
The world around her was quiet as only the time after a storm can be—an exhausted stillness, the air washed clean, the light returning, golden and innocent, as if nothing at all had happened.
Debris lay scattered across the yard. The tarpaulin had torn loose from the barn.
A heavy metal bucket had come to rest upside down against the fence post near where she lay.
She pushed herself upright, slowly, her hand going to her eyebrow where the pain was worst. Her fingers came away dark and sticky.
“Pa,” she said quietly. “Papa, are you there?”
Her head was foggy, and as she looked about her, she could hardly make sense of the chaos around her.
And then she saw him.
He was lying near the north fence, back where she had reached him.
He had not moved an inch and was lying very still, one arm outstretched, his face turned to the side away from her, and even before she crawled to him and pressed her fingers to his neck and felt the terrible, absolute stillness there, she knew.
She knew. And yet she still couldn’t bring herself to think it.
“No.” The word came out barely above a whisper. “No, no… Papa. My pa. No, please—”
She took his hand in both of hers. It was cold already.
She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious, but he must have collapsed almost as she was struck.
Otherwise, he would surely have come to her aid, and she would have found him lying beside her in the dirt.
Instead, he had slumped against the fence and slipped away.
But right now, Hazel knew only that he was gone, and when he needed her, she had been lying unconscious not three feet away.
She pressed his hand against her forehead and stayed there in the silent yard strewn with broken shingles and snapped branches while the golden light came back across the hills, and the guilt settled into her heart, heavy, permanent, and cold.
She had no one left.
And somewhere above her eyebrow, the wound was still bleeding, marking her face with a scar she would carry till the end of her days.
A reminder of the worst loss she had ever known.