The Orphan Train To Missouri (Orphan Trains Out West #4)

Camden Bluff, Missouri, 1888. Ada Baldwin is up before the town is.

She feeds the boat crews, keeps her accounts in a school copybook, and raises two children above the clatter of the landing.

Three years a widow, she is all but promised to the mill owner, and every soul in the county agrees it is the sensible match.

Then a quiet river man takes the corner table and does not leave.

Louie Morritt mends her sagging dock without being asked. He teaches her wary son to splice a rope. He listens to her small daughter as though her opinions were freight worth hauling. He is patient, weathered, and he watches Ada the way a man watches a road he thinks he has traveled before.

Nobody in Camden Bluff can answer a single question about him. No people, no land, not even a name he was born with.

Ada has a bedtime story she has told a thousand nights, about two children in a little blue boat on a river with no end. She has never once known how it finishes. She has always supposed she dreamed it.

Then, on a rainy Tuesday, the boatman hears her tell it, and his hand begins to shake.

Some promises take twenty years to keep. Some names are worth keeping, however long they have been lost.