Chapter Twelve
Collins Ranch, near Bozeman, Montana Territory
Sixteen days in, and Zoe Preston was beginning to understand that the trouble with a trial period was the period part.
She lay in Mary Collins’s bed in the dark before five with the quilt pulled to her chin and her eyes on the ceiling and the arithmetic running again, the same arithmetic that had been waking her early for the past week.
Thirty days. Sixteen gone. Fourteen remaining.
The numbers sat in her chest with a familiar and entirely unwelcome weight.
Lord, she prayed, in the dark and the quiet, I would like to talk to You about this trial.
I know You know what I am going to say, and I know You know how it ends, and I would appreciate You sharing that information at the earliest opportunity.
Not because I lack faith. Because I have had sixteen days of growing very attached to a child and a kitchen and a difficult, honest man, and I would very much like to know whether I am building something or furnishing a room I am going to have to leave.
The pre-dawn wind moved in the cottonwoods.
I take Your silence as an answer, Zoe added. I respect it. I am going to get up and milk the cows now.
The cold of the floor through her stockings was, at the end of September, no longer a surprise.
She had learned the pine boards, which ones were cold and which ones held their warmth from the stove, and she moved through the dark of the room by memory now, finding her dress by touch, pinning her hair up with practiced speed.
She descended the stairs in the grey pre-dawn, third stair from the top creaking, same as always.
The kitchen was empty.
Eleven nights ago she had come down with her candle and had found Wade at the writing table with a sheet of paper under his hand.
He had folded the paper before she reached the bottom stair.
She had stopped at the foot of the stairs with the candle in her hand. He had looked up at her with the sheet of paper folded under his palm. She had lifted one eyebrow at him. He had set his other hand flat over the first.
Then he had risen from the writing table without a word, taken the folded paper with him, and gone past her up the stairs with a small, clipped good night.
She hadn’t seen the paper or him at the writing table since.
She wondered now what he’d been writing.
She made coffee with the cold water trick Inga had shown her at the boarding house and poured it into a flask, wrapped herself in her wool coat and her grey shawl, and went out into the September morning.
The cold at this hour had a quality she had never encountered in Albany.
It was a dry cold, sharp edged, with the smell of pine and frost and something mineral she associated with elevation.
It pressed against her face and throat and drove the last of the sleep out of her in a single bracing breath.
The sky above the Bridgers was the dark blue of the hour before dawn, with one star burning white and steady at the eastern edge.
The cattle were moving in the south pasture, their breath coming up in low white clouds.
Job and Patience appeared from under the porch at her step, fell in beside her on either side, and escorted her to the barn.
The barn smelled of hay and horse and the warm, close smell of large animals and their heat, which Zoe had learned to find deeply reassuring. She lit the barn lantern from her candle, hung it on the nail, and settled her stool at Hilda’s flank.
Hilda was one of three dairy cows, an amiable broad red beast with a calm temperament and a full bag every morning. Zoe set her forehead against the warm flank, positioned her hands, and began.
The rhythm of the new chore came quickly, even after only the past three mornings of practice.
Her hands had begun to know the motion. The milk rang against the tin bucket on the first pulls and then shifted to a lower sound as the bucket filled.
The barn was quiet around her, and Zoe’s mind ran its quiet parallel track.
Three days ago, Brody’s answering letter had come, a single folded page whose contents were both exactly what she expected and, somehow, still, a small bruise.
He thanked her for writing, said Bonnie was well, asked two or three questions about Montana and answered none of hers about himself, which was so precisely Brody’s manner that she had folded the letter and put it in the writing desk drawer and told herself that her brother loved her.
He simply expressed it poorly, which was true.
She was two thousand miles away from the house that had made her feel unwanted, which was also true. She was grateful for both facts.
At least, she tried very hard to be.
Hilda shifted once.
“I know,” Zoe told her. “Almost done.”
The bucket was full enough that she felt the weight in her arms the moment she lifted it.
A full pail of fresh milk was a considerable thing.
She had managed it on previous mornings by gripping with both hands and walking slowly to the barn door, where she could set it down and rest her arms before crossing the yard.
This morning, her left hand slipped.
The bucket lurched. She caught it with both hands but the momentum of it had taken the balance from her feet, and she staggered left and found, in the same instant, a large warm hand closing over both of hers from behind.
The bucket steadied.
She went very still. The warmth of his body held at her back at the careful distance of three inches. The smell of his coat—pine and the cold from outside and the faint warm leather of the lining—filled her senses and her breath caught at the back of her throat.
She knew who it was before he spoke.
“I have it,” Wade said from directly behind her left shoulder.
His hands were over hers, large and warm in the cold of the morning.
Zoe stood with her back almost against his chest and the smell of coffee and cold air and wool and the particular warmth of his skin coming up at the side of her neck.
She breathed once through her nose and could not find the second breath.
His hands did not move.
Neither did hers.
The weight of the bucket sat between his palms and hers, and his palms sat between his coat and hers. His breath touched the loose curl at her temple.
A count of three passed. A count of four.
“Thank you,” she said. The word came out lower than she intended.
“Step back,” he answered. His voice came lower than hers.
His hands stayed on hers. The warmth of his chest radiated behind her shoulder. Her heart thumped at the side of her neck, and she could feel his beating in the thumb at the back of her hand through her own glove.
She stepped back.
He took the bucket from her. The weight of it left her palms with a small ache she had not noticed until it was gone, and a second small ache rose at the back of her wrist where his glove had brushed past the cuff of her sleeve.
He lifted the bucket cleanly and carried it to the barn door without apparent effort and set it on the stone step.
He didn’t look at her on the way past.
Hilda chewed in her stall. The cold morning air at the open door breathed once across the straw.
“I’ll carry the bucket to the kitchen for you.”
Zoe straightened her coat. She picked up her lantern.
“I had it,” she said, warmly.
“You would have worn it to breakfast.”
She pressed her lips together against a laugh. He picked up the bucket again and started for the house, and she fell in beside him across the frost-hard yard.
“You’re up early,” she offered.
“I’m always up at this hour,” he replied.
“I know. I meant you’re up early for the barn. You’re usually at the north fence by five.”
“The fence line is done,” he said. “I finished it yesterday.”
“The entire thing?”
“George helped.”
“Oh,” she said.
The corner of his mouth moved.
They reached the kitchen. He set the bucket on the table. Zoe hung her coat and shawl on the peg and went to the stove, where the fire was up and the kettle was steaming, and she brought out the milk pot and the straining cloth from the shelf.
“We should boil half,” Wade said, behind her. “The temperature last night was cold enough to keep the rest for the evening, but this half will turn by tomorrow if you leave it raw.”
“I know,” she said pleasantly.
“You need to heat it to just below the boil and hold it there for...”
“I have been boiling milk since I was ten years old.” Zoe set the pot on the stove with a small decisive sound. “My mother kept a house cow for twelve years. I am familiar with the procedure.”
A pause.
“All right,” he said.
“Thank you for telling me, anyway,” she added, smiling at the pot. “In case I had forgotten.”
She turned from the stove and looked at him. His jaw worked once. His eyes were fixed to a point on the floorboards three feet in front of his boots.
“Does it bother you?” he said, completing the thought.
She looked at him steadily.
“Sometimes,” she said honestly. “When I have already done the thing and you explain the thing I have done. That particular order of events…” She kept her voice warm. “When you explain before, I am grateful. When you explain after, I am somewhat less grateful.”
“I will try to note the difference,” he said.
“That is all I ask.”
He stayed at the table. She turned back to the stove and measured milk into the pot, watching the surface for the first tremor of heat. The kitchen filled with the smell of fresh milk warming on a good stove, a smell that belonged, in Zoe’s experience, specifically to early mornings.
“Tell me about your house cow,” Wade said behind her.
She looked over her shoulder.
He had pulled out the far chair at the table and sat down, and his long hands were folded on the table.
“Her name was Clara,” Zoe said, turning back to the pot. “Brown and white, and a steady worker, very much in the manner of Hilda. My mother named her for a school friend. The school friend was apparently also brown-haired and reliable.”
“Was the cow?”