Chapter One
Clay County, Missouri
Ethan did not cry the day his mother died.
He told himself it was because he had expected her death for some time.
Ma’s health had been declining for years, despite the frequent visits from physicians and every kind of medicine under the sun.
Logically, there was no reason to cry when he had known that the end was near.
Yet his lack of tears still felt like an insult to the woman who had given him so much.
But maybe it was for the best. Ethan had become accustomed to being the strong one. He could not afford to crumble now, not when his sister depended on him so much.
“Are you all right?” Hannah stood beside him, appearing slight and pale in her heavy black dress.
Ethan shrugged. “The same as you, I imagine.”
“So, terrible?”
That got a wan smile out of him. “Something like that.”
Hannah nodded. “I feel a little better now that everyone else is gone,” she said. “I—I know they meant well, but every time someone told me how wonderful Ma was, I thought I might cry.”
“It’s hard.”
Hannah looked at him, her hazel eyes bloodshot from her tears. “Just us now,” she said. “I don’t know how I would survive without you, Ethan.”
He fixed his gaze on the mound of earth in front of them.
In a cemetery filled with grass and weeds and aged stones, Ma’s grave was fresh and poignant.
It drew the eye in a way that others did not, and an ache curled in Ethan’s chest when he imagined his ma’s grave, ancient and overgrown like the others were.
“You would find a way,” he said distantly. “You’re strong, Hannah.”
His sister was forced to be so, much like Ethan.
Despite his best efforts to take care of Hannah and Ma, Ethan knew he had failed.
He had still been a child himself when their father abandoned them, and while he tried to be everything Hannah needed, a brother’s love couldn’t really replace a father.
They had all made sacrifices to survive, and Hannah’s had been her childhood.
“No,” Hannah said. “No, Ethan. I’m not that strong. I need people.”
“Everyone does.”
“More than most.”
Ethan looked at his sister and saw the tears forming anew in her eyes. He softened and squeezed her hand.
“You should be kinder to yourself.”
Hannah shook her head and turned her face away.
Ethan knew her well enough to know she was trying to hide her tears.
Hannah was twenty years old, so her quickness to tears embarrassed her.
She had always been a soft-hearted soul.
Ethan had tried to tell her time and time again that everyone, including him, found her gentleness admirable.
Hannah remained unconvinced.
“The town just feels hollow,” she continued. “Without Ma, what is there left for us here?”
Ethan didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Despite having lived in the same county for their entire lives, Ethan and Hannah weren’t close friends with anyone in the town.
They seldom spoke of Pa, but the townsfolk had plenty to say about him.
None of them had been around when Ethan and Hannah were young and struggling, but everyone seemed to have an opinion about their father leaving them for another family.
Why would anyone want to associate with people like that?
Besides, the fewer people Ethan and Hannah let into their lives, the less likely they were to be disappointed.
“We have each other,” Ethan said.
His chest ached. Hannah was all that he had, his only family. She was wonderful, but still, there was a small part of him that ached for Ma, and even Pa. For the family they might have been. Instead, it was the two of them alone against the world.
Once, there had been someone else, a brother of sorts, but Ethan forced away all thoughts of Logan before the grief could overwhelm him.
“True.”
Hannah wrapped her arms around herself and lowered her head. She sniffed and made a strangled sound. Tears fell and left tracks down her cheeks, disappearing beneath the high collar of her dress.
“I—I miss her,” Hannah choked out. “I miss her so much that it hurts to breathe. First, Pa. And now—now, Ma! It isn’t fair!”
“I know.”
“She should have lived so much longer. She deserved to have a happy life,” Hannah continued. “She should have lived to see her grandchildren! To find love again. To—to do everything she always wanted!”
Ethan swallowed hard. Everything inside him felt like it was breaking, but he had to remain strong for Hannah.
That was the way it had always been between them.
He stayed solid and steady so Hannah could be gentle and kind.
Still, he turned away so she wouldn’t see him blink away the threatening tears.
“I know,” Ethan said, forcing his voice to be steady. “She deserved all of that.”
He tried to bury the voice inside him, insisting that this was their pa’s fault. Ma had been sick ever since he left.
He sensed that Hannah wasn’t really making conversation. She just needed to get her thoughts out into the world. Ma had been like that, too, back when they had been a happy family, a time that now existed only at the edges of his memory.
He remembered Ma seated on the porch, her legs dangling over the edge as she pointed out the constellations to him, whispering stories about the patterns.
Pa had sat on the steps whittling, while Hannah had been running around chasing fireflies.
Ma had liked to talk. She’d fill every moment of a quiet night with the sound of her voice, gentle and sweet.
“This place reminds me of everything that’s gone wrong,” Hannah added. Ethan first thought she meant the cemetery, and moved to escort her away from Ma’s grave, but she continued. “The whole town does. It’s as if we’re haunted. Pa leaving us, everything that followed, and—and Derek.”
Ethan hissed between his teeth, forcing back the instinctive flare of frustration that rose any time Derek Walker’s name was mentioned.
Derek was their half-brother, Pa’s son with the woman who convinced him to abandon his family.
Eventually, Pa had gotten a divorce and married the woman proper.
As if to add insult to injury, though, Pa had continued to live in the very same town as them with his new wife and the new son he publicly doted on.
Derek himself wasn’t any prize, either. Ethan tried not to think uncharitably about people; it wasn’t nice.
But he also figured that he had good reason to dislike the boy, who was now fourteen.
Derek was young and reckless, and it seemed that nearly everyone in town liked him.
Ethan, however, refused to be taken in so easily.
When he was Derek’s age, he had taken care of his mother and sister on his own, and this impulsive boy was just—
Just immature and foolish. Ethan always found his jaw clenched when he thought about Pa and how that was the son he found so worthy of his love, when Ethan hadn’t been good enough.
A small seed of guilt grew in Ethan’s chest. While Ethan was more responsible than Derek ever had been, that didn’t mean he’d never behaved recklessly as a young man. A bitter part of Ethan noted that Derek’s actions had never killed anyone…unlike his own.
“It has been so much to endure,” Hannah said, drawing Ethan from his own woeful thoughts. “I just wish that… I mean— Do you ever think about how our lives might have been if things hadn’t fallen to pieces? If Pa had never left us?”
They never spoke to Pa, and he never spoke to them.
If it hadn’t been for Derek, who was overly friendly by nature, Ethan wouldn’t have known anything about what his father was doing.
And he found that he didn’t particularly care.
The man who had abandoned them did not deserve even a little of Ethan’s consideration, much less his love.
“There’s no point in thinking about what might have happened,” Ethan said. “You’ll only upset yourself, Hannah, imagining what might have been rather than facing what is.”
His sister sighed deeply, her shoulders slumping, as if a great weight had suddenly descended upon them. “I’m not like you, Ethan. It is against my nature not to consider what might have happened.”
“I know.” Ethan paused. “I’m grateful that you’re still so light and loving. Sometimes I wish I could be more sensitive, like you.”
He couldn’t be, and wasn’t even sure if he really did want to be more sensitive, but the words would comfort Hannah.
She sniffed. “It’s just so unfair! We’re good people, and we—we deserve to be happy.”
Ethan sighed. She was right, of course. But what else was there to say?
Hannah drew out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. “I just—I cannot stomach the injustice of it all. We deserve better than life has given us, Ethan.”
“Unfortunately, life doesn’t always give us what we deserve,” Ethan replied.
But Hannah already knew that, surely.
“Maybe we should do something to make our own happiness, though,” Ethan said. “It would be a blessing if everyone received good things, but that isn’t the way of the world. Perhaps God is testing us.”
Hannah sighed. “I feel as though we have been tested more than our share.”
Ethan cleared his throat. “Maybe we’re stronger for it,” he said, shrugging helplessly. “Or maybe we’ll just—eventually—run out of bad luck.”
He was floundering. What could he say? Ethan was torn between being reasonable and railing against the world for being so unjust. It wasn’t fair. It was never fair.
Hannah looked at him then. An uneven flush of red spread over her cheeks, still streaked with tears. “I do not want to be stronger.”
Ethan inhaled deeply, and his chest throbbed with a small pang. Hannah had grown into an independent young lady, and he was proud of who she had become. She was proof that he had done one thing well, at least; he had managed to see her mostly grown, and soon old enough to marry.
Sometimes, however, he ached for the little sister who could be consoled with a few words and a gentle smile.
“Maybe we need a new start,” Ethan said. “What do you think? We can go somewhere out west and begin a new life, somewhere the past won’t follow us. There’s plenty of new land out there that holds no ghosts for us.”
He had only just thought of the idea, but he had to admit that he liked it.
Wouldn’t it be freeing to be far away from his neglectful father and his vexing half-brother?
For the first time in their lives, they could live in a town where nobody knew them or their history, a place where other townsfolk would no longer look at them with pity.
“Where do you think we could go?” Hannah asked.
Ethan shrugged. “I don’t know yet, but we can think about it. Make a smart choice after we look into it a bit.”
Hannah bit her lip, her gaze drifting to their mother’s grave. “We would have to leave her.”
“No,” Ethan said. “We would carry her in our hearts. She’s in heaven now, watching over us. And I really think she’d understand.”
His own chest tightened, though, when he thought of their mother’s grave being left to decay in obscurity.
There would be no children or grandchildren to care for it.
Within a few generations, everyone in the town would forget all about Ma if Ethan and Hannah weren’t here to keep the story of her alive.
Even if they spoke of her elsewhere, it wouldn’t quite be the same.
“But would she want that?” Hannah asked. “She never left this place, even when living here seemed impossible.”
Ethan knew that his sister was referring to the divorce and the mixture of pity and disgust from their neighbors that had followed.
In those days, their mother had barely been present.
She had drifted through her days as if she was asleep, even when she was awake.
For Ethan, that had been more difficult than even Pa’s abandonment.
He had taken on the role of the man of the house, tending to his mother when she could not even leave her bed for grief, while also ensuring that Hannah was fed and clothed and seen off to school.
“Ma was ill for most of that,” Ethan said carefully. “Even before this last bout, she was unwell. If not, maybe she would have left herself.”
Hannah bit her lip, and Ethan knew her well enough to see that she was anxious. His sister was always excited by the prospect of something new, but she tended to hesitate when it came to actually doing it.
“It’s something to think about,” Ethan continued. “We can go somewhere new, anywhere in the world, and begin a life of our own. People do it all the time.”
“And where do they go?”
He shrugged. “Wherever they want. I reckon I’d want to go farther west, like I said. I’ve heard there’s a lot of opportunity there.”
“A lot of danger as well, and hardship.”
“That may be,” Ethan said. “But as you just said, we’ve experienced more than our fair share of hardship, and we’ve come out stronger for it. If anyone can flourish out west, it’s us.”
Hannah sighed and tucked her handkerchief into her sleeve once more. “Well,” she said after some length, “I suppose it is something to consider after all. Maybe after…after some time has passed, and we have managed to ward off all the well-wishers. After we have learned to live without…without Ma.”
“Yes.”
Living without Ma seemed impossible, but Ethan knew that, eventually, the wounds from her death would dull. Never fully, but enough to survive.
After all, they had lost Pa and lived. The loss of their kind, gentle mother would be far harder, but Ethan and Hannah would endure, as they always had.