Chapter Three
Tucson, Arizona
It was only a dream. The same dream he had so often these days.
He always knew it, on some level—some distant, watching part of him that stood apart from the nightmare and said, This is not real, this is not now, you have survived this already.
But somehow knowing it did not help. Not even a little bit.
As soon as the dream took hold, it took all of him with it; every sensible thought dissolved as he plunged into the suffocating terror of that terrible night.
He was back inside that night as completely as if two years had never passed at all.
The house was dark. That was the first thing.
The darkness pressed in from every side.
And then the sounds. The splintering crash of the back door giving way.
The low, ugly voices of men who had not come to talk or reason.
He remembered reaching for Florence before he was fully awake, his hand finding her arm in the dark, and the two of them scrambling upright as the sounds moved closer, the men crashing through the downstairs rooms. They had no fear of being heard; they knew what Noah knew too.
There would be no stopping them. He was one man, startled from sleep, and, by the sounds of it, they were many.
The boys. That was all he could think of. The boys are sleeping in their room.
He had tried to get to them. That was what the nightmare came back to every time—the fact that he had tried. The terrible, futile struggle. It made him try again. Made him hope. But failure was inevitable.
He had put himself between Florence and the door, had told her to run, had taken the first blow across his shoulder and kept standing because his sons were sleeping upstairs and nothing on earth was going to make him fall.
But there had been so many of them.
And Florence—
He woke up with cold sweat beading his brow and his heart thundering in his ears, a silent scream on his lips.
He lay there for a moment, his chest heaving, one fist tangled in the bedsheet, staring at the ceiling until the pale gray light of dawn confirmed what part of him already knew.
His room. His ceiling. Tucson. 1896.
He was alive.
He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth and breathed through it until his heart found its rhythm again and the panic ebbed away.
This was the ritual. He had it down to a kind of grim precision now, this slow reassembly of the present moment out of the wreckage of the past. Some mornings it took longer than others.
This morning, with the anniversary of Florence’s death hanging over him, it took a while longer than usual.
He turned his head on the pillow. The other side of the bed was smooth and untouched, the way it had been every morning for two years.
He had stopped looking at it with the same wrenching shock a while back.
Now it was simply a fact. One of many facts he had learned to live with. What choice did he have?
He sat up. Pushed his dark hair back from his face.
He wore it longer than he used to, longer than was strictly practical, because it covered the scars those bandits had left him with.
The damage to his ear. The constant, maddening silence on the left side reminded him every waking moment of that night and everything he had lost to it.
He got up. There was always work, and work was the only thing that reliably held the darkness at bay.
***
The kitchen was cold when he came downstairs, the stove not yet lit, the early morning light thin and pale and gray through the window above the sink.
He built the fire with practiced hands, barely needing to think about what he was doing, then stood with his hands braced against the counter for a moment while the kindling caught and then a log began to sizzle.
Eventually, the warmth began to push back the chill.
Eggs. Bread. Coffee, strong enough to keep him going despite the night he’d had. Sleep was a luxury these days, and in short supply.
He was halfway through cracking and whisking the eggs when he heard small sounds from upstairs—the thump of feet hitting the floor, the muffled conference of two six-year-old voices getting up to mischief, no doubt.
He tilted his head to the right, catching the sounds on his good side. Something in his chest loosened.
They were up. They were fine. They had always been fine. He had saved them even if he hadn’t saved their mother. His boys.
David appeared first, as he always did, thundering down the stairs with a complete disregard for the quiet of the morning.
Boisterous and strong, with freckled cheeks of the sort old ladies loved to squeeze, he arrived in the kitchen doorway with his thick, dark hair sticking up at every angle.
He had always been like that—always the loudest in any room, the life and soul of any gathering.
Noah sometimes caught himself looking at his son and seeing himself as he had been at that age, before life had done its bitter work on him.
Lewis came behind, quieter and more careful, one hand trailing the wall.
He looked at the pan on the stove, then at his father, and gave a small, satisfied nod, as if confirming that the morning was proceeding correctly.
He had a more delicate frame than his brother, slim and lithe, and a paler coloring—his hair so blond that in some lights it almost looked white.
Side by side they were like a badger cub and a fox cub.
“Morning,” Noah said, pouring the whisked eggs into the hot pan and stirring them.
“Morning, Papa.” David was already pulling out his chair.
Lewis climbed into his own seat and looked at Noah with those watchful dark eyes that sometimes saw too much. “Did you have the dream again?”
Noah turned back to the pan and dished out the eggs instead of answering. “Eat your breakfast.” It took all his strength not to show what the question cost him. His back to the room, he winced and let out a deep breath.
Lewis picked up his fork and pulled the bread toward him and said nothing more.
***
Pauline arrived at half past seven, as she always did, coming down the road from her parents’ place with her dark hair pinned neatly and her capable, cheerful manner preceding her through the door like a warm front.
She was only twenty-four but carried herself with the confidence of an older woman.
She came six mornings a week as a matter of course and went home to her own bed at night, unless the weather or the work kept her, in which case she took the small room off the landing without needing to be asked.
“Morning, Mr. Graham. Boys.” She set her basket on the counter and assessed the kitchen in one swift glance. “You’ve eaten already. Good. Lewis, you have egg on your chin.”
Lewis wiped his chin with great dignity.
Noah was already pulling on his jacket. He found people hard work these days and preferred not to get drawn into pleasantries.
Not least because his bad ear made it difficult to hear.
He turned toward her so he could see her face before he spoke, so he might read her lips.
Pauline was better than most. She had worked out early on that he needed to see her face, and she gave it to him without making a performance of it.
She spoke slowly and clearly. Noah appreciated that.
“Robert coming today?” she asked.
She smiled at that, a small private smile that she directed at the basket rather than at him, and Noah filed it away without comment.
He had noticed before the way she smiled when Robert’s name came up.
He suspected Robert had noticed too, though neither of them had said anything about it.
There was enough going on without adding that to the list.
He said goodbye to his sons, touched Lewis briefly on the top of his careful, serious head, and went out to work.
***
The morning was clear and dry, the Tucson sky already turning from pale gold to a deep and brilliant blue.
Noah walked the fence line first, as he always did, checking each post and rail, cataloging what needed attention.
It was a good ranch. He had built it into something solid and dependable over the better part of a decade.
He had put his hands into this land and coaxed a living out of it—a living and a home.
Even now—even in the years since that night had stripped the joy out of almost everything else—he could walk this fence line and feel a satisfaction in what was here.
He was working the east corner when he heard the hoofbeats and turned to see Robert MacGregor coming down the track at an easy canter, sitting astride his horse with the relaxed confidence of a man who had grown up in the saddle and only got out of it if it really couldn’t be avoided.
He wore his hat pushed back, revealing a strong jaw and gray eyes framed by flaxen hair.
He was thirty years old and had worked outside his whole life, so his face was deeply tanned, and the lines of a broad smile marked his cheeks.
He raised a hand when he saw Noah, and Noah lifted one back in reply.
Robert tied up at the fence and dropped down in one smooth motion, coming to lean against the post.
Robert was among the very few men Noah counted as friends.
There was a particular freedom in that. It meant he didn’t need to pretend. And Noah was grateful for it even if he had never found the words to say so.
“You look terrible,” Robert said cheerfully.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Dream again?”
Noah nodded briskly before returning his attention to the fence post. “I’m fine.” Apparently, he wasn’t hiding it as well as he’d imagined.
“I didn’t ask if you were fine. I can see that with my own eyes.”
Noah drove the heel of his boot against the base of the post, testing it. “It doesn’t matter.”
Robert was quiet for a moment. Around them, the ranch went about its morning—the sounds of the cattle in the far field, the rustle of wind through the dry grass, the distant, bright voices of birds Noah couldn’t name.
He had found, since losing the hearing on his left side, that he paid more attention to the sounds that remained. Cataloged them. Held onto them.
“You can’t keep going like this,” Robert said finally.
“I’m managing.”
“You’re surviving. It’s not the same thing.” He paused. “The boys need more than just surviving, Noah.”
That landed. It was meant to. Noah set his jaw and moved to the next post.
“Pauline is wonderful with them,” Robert continued, falling into step beside him, “but she’s their governess. They need—the house needs—” He seemed to choose his next words with some care. “You need someone.”
“I’m not ready.”
“I know you’re not ready. I’m not sure you’ll ever feel ready.
But I also know that you’re drowning up here alone, and you won’t ask anyone for help.
” Robert stopped walking. Noah stopped too.
“There are women who are looking for exactly this—a home, a good man, a place to build something. It doesn’t have to be…
everything at once. It just has to be a start. People advertise.”
Noah looked at him.
“A mail-order bride,” Robert said, simply and plainly.
“Absolutely not. I’ve been married. I had a wife—a real wife. I don’t need some—charade of marriage. We’ve talked about this before—countless times. And my answer’s the same.”
But Robert’s words still hung between them in the morning air.
Without meaning to, Noah turned them over.
He thought about how quiet the house was in the evenings.
He thought about the overwhelming, relentless weight of the ranch and the children and the house and the silence, all of it pressing down at once, all of it his responsibility and no one else’s.
He thought about Florence, her auburn hair in the sunlight, the gentle way she had with the children and with him. The guilt came up hot under his breastbone.
But Robert was looking at him with that patient expression that said he would wait as long as it took because he knew he was right and Noah would give in eventually. And the morning was already wearing on, and there was a whole day’s work still ahead of him.
“It would be a betrayal of Florence,” he said, and his voice was not entirely steady. “Of everything we had together.”
“It would be nothing like what you had with Florence. What I’m talking about is a mutually beneficial arrangement, nothing more. Plenty do it. It doesn’t mean anything like what you said—a betrayal? Absolutely not. I knew Florence, and I know she wouldn’t want you struggling alone.”
There was truth in that, Noah could admit. Florence would be shocked and saddened if she knew the life he’d been living. And wasn’t that its own betrayal after all?
“She’d be coming into someone else’s life,” Noah said at last. “Someone else’s home.”
“Yes.”
“It wouldn’t be—” He stopped. It wouldn’t be love, he had been going to say. Not the real kind. Not the kind he’d had and lost. “It would be an arrangement.”
“To start with, sure.”
He was quiet for a long moment, trying to find the words. The sun climbed another degree above the hills, and the ranch spread out around him. This place was his joy as well as his work—but Robert was right about one thing. It was entirely too much for one man to carry alone.
“There would be less pressure,” he said slowly, “in an arrangement. If everyone understood it was really about business—work. A job almost.”
“Exactly. Almost like that. To begin with.”
Noah exhaled. Looked out across the east field. Felt the weight of every morning like this one, every breakfast made in a cold kitchen, every dream that left him shaking in a room he slept in alone.
“Fine,” he said. “It might be nice to have a woman about the place.”
Robert’s face broke into a grin that he managed, just barely, to keep from being triumphant.
“Yes, and you could use the help. Michael Campbell’s been moving in on your clients, you know. All the time you’re away from the world; it keeps on turning without you. You need someone to help you get back to yourself, back to the world. Before there’s nothing left to come back to.”
“Fine,” Noah said again, his voice exhausted and thin. “You’re right. You don’t need to look so pleased. And I’m writing the letter myself.”