The Orphan Train to Texas (Orphan Trains Out West #5)

Nobody wants the boy at the end of the row.

He is ten, thin as a lath, in a coat cut for a bigger child, and he has stopped pretending to smile.

Two families look at him and walk on. Then a rich old woman in black silk climbs the platform steps, feels his arms the way a buyer feels a hog, and says he will do for the yard.

Samantha Bree watches it from the Texas dust with her hands folded and her whole life going cold, because it happened to her once, in Iowa, when she was eight.

She is the Stuart bride now. Beautiful, capable, admired by the whole county, and living every hour on a lie. To defend that boy is to invite the one question she cannot survive. To stay silent is to watch him become her.

Her wedding is three weeks off. Her mother-in-law is still watching. A man from Iowa is on a southbound train with a claim to make, and everything she has built stands on ground thinner than she can bear.

Some secrets keep you alive. This one is going to ask her for everything.