Chapter One
The directions said to follow the creek past the lightning-split pine and turn north at the cairn of stacked stones, which would have worked fine if there had been one lightning-split pine.
But Montana, it turned out, did a lot of things to its pine trees, and half of them looked like they'd been struck by something angry.
Evelyn had passed three candidates already, each one more convincingly ruined than the last.
The letter itself, four pages of detailed instructions folded into Evelyn's coat pocket, had grown soft at the creases from how many times she'd pulled it out.
She unfolded it again now, standing in the bed of the rented buckboard with the mule idling in its traces and the whole of Montana spreading out around her in every direction.
There was more land than she'd seen in her entire life combined, and all of it was empty.
After the pine, you'll see a cairn. Sam built it years back so I'd stop getting lost. Turn north there and follow the track another mile. The house sits in a clearing with the barn to the left and the chicken coop behind. You can't miss it.
You can't miss it. People always said that about things you could absolutely miss.
But then the track curved around a stand of cottonwoods, and there it sat. The Cooper homestead. And before any of it registered—the barn or the chicken coop or the corral—one thing landed. Somebody loved this place.
You could tell. You could always tell. The porch had been swept recently.
The rocking chair on it sat angled toward the valley, as if someone had placed it there for the view and meant it.
The logs were chinked tight, no gaps, no lazy patches.
Even the chicken coop had a gate that hung straight on its hinges.
Evelyn had grown up in a building where nothing hung straight—not the doors, not the shutters, not the matron's disposition—so she noticed things like that. Probably always would.
Sarah Cooper had built a home. An actual home, not just a place where a person slept and kept their things, but something that looked like it would miss you if you left.
Evelyn had never lived anywhere that would miss her.
She climbed down from the buckboard. Her legs ached from three days on trains and two more on coaches.
She'd eaten nothing since that morning but a cold biscuit and a strip of jerky bought from a station stop where the man behind the counter had charged her fifteen cents for what amounted to salted leather.
The spare key sat under the third porch step, wedged into a gap between the boards. Sarah's instructions, right again. Evelyn pulled it free, brushed off the dirt, and unlocked the front door.
Inside, the first breath told her more than looking around did.
She could smell cedar, cold hearth ash, and something faintly sweet.
Dried lavender. She spotted it hanging in bunches from a nail by the window.
Sarah's touch. It hit somewhere specific, somewhere behind her ribs, because Evelyn had been reading this woman's letters for twelve years but had never stood inside her life before.
Here it all sat, real and solid. A quilt folded over the back of a chair, the stitching careful and even. A Bible on a side table with a pressed wildflower marking a page. The cookstove, cast iron with four burners and an oven box, better than anything Evelyn had ever cooked on.
One door off the main room opened into a small bedroom. She poked her head in long enough to see a narrow bed, a trunk, and a man's coat hanging from a wall peg.
Sam's room. Right. The brother. The bounty hunter Sarah had mentioned in nearly every letter, always tangled up in pride and exasperation both.
Evelyn had pictured him as being older, somehow.
Rougher. The coat hanging on the peg rather than being folded and put away said something about him.
He was a man who lived in transit, who kept a room but didn't really inhabit it.
She pulled the door shut. It was none of her business.
Upstairs, the loft held a bed with a straw-tick mattress, a washstand with a chipped basin, and a window. Evelyn set her bag down and stood at that window and… well...
She'd expected mountains. Sarah had described them often enough.
But reading about mountains and then actually standing in front of them turned out to be two completely different propositions.
They just went up. And up. And they didn't stop.
The sky above them didn't stop either, and Springfield, with its flat fields running to the horizon in every direction, suddenly seemed like a place that had never even attempted to be interesting.
She could have stood there looking at the scenery for a long time, but standing at windows did not feed chickens.
Sarah's instructions covered the animals in precise detail, and Evelyn intended to follow every word because, aside from sewing a straight seam and how to cry silently, the one useful thing the orphanage had taught her had been how to follow instructions.
She went back downstairs and got to work.
The chickens came first. There were eight of them, red and brown, and scratching around their coop with an air of deep personal suspicion toward Evelyn specifically.
She found the feed sack in the barn exactly where Sarah had described it, and scattered grain the way the letter had instructed.
The chickens attacked it as though they hadn't eaten in a week.
Given the timing of Sarah's departure, they probably hadn't.
She made a note to scatter extra in the morning.
The two horses in the corral needed water. The trough had run low, so she pumped water from the well beside the barn, hauling the bucket back and forth four times until the trough was full. The horses drank without acknowledging her effort. Typical.
A milk cow stood in a stall at the back of the barn, lowing at Evelyn with an expression of mild accusation.
Sarah's letter had dedicated an entire paragraph to milking, complete with a small diagram of proper hand positioning.
Evelyn had milked a cow exactly once in her life at the orphanage.
She had been only nine years old, and the cow had kicked over the pail.
She milked this one anyway. It took twice as long as it should have and produced maybe half of what the cow had to give, but the pail stayed upright, and nobody got kicked, so she took that as a win.
By the time she had finished securing the barn doors and checking the fence line for gaps, dusk had dropped fast from the mountains, and the temperature had fallen with it. Her hands ached from the pump, and the milking, and the cold; her fingers were stiff and clumsy.
Inside, she built up the fire in the cookstove, feeding kindling until the firebox caught and the iron started cracking with the heat.
Sarah had left supplies in a wooden crate on the counter: flour, salt, a tin of lard, dried beans, cornmeal, a small sack of coffee beans, and a jar of chokecherry jam with a cloth lid tied on with string.
Evelyn ground coffee in the hand-crank mill that was bolted to the wall and boiled it in a tin pot.
It came out strong enough to strip paint, which suited her just fine.
She made cornbread in a cast-iron skillet—the one thing she could cook without thinking—and ate it with the jam standing at the counter. The table behind her had two chairs. She simply preferred standing. That covered it.
She washed the dishes, banked the fire, checked the door, and checked it again. Then she latched the windows.
Upstairs, she changed into her nightgown—a long white cotton shift with a high collar—and unpinned her hair. The braid fell heavy against her back. She slid under the quilt and lay there.
There was total silence, the like of which she wasn’t used to at all.
An absolute sense of nothingness. No footsteps from a neighbor above.
No street noise, no drunks stumbling past on the boardwalk.
No town at all. Just the wind and the house easing into itself.
Somewhere far off, a coyote was going about its business in whatever way coyotes did.
And the silence here was the real kind, the kind with nothing hiding behind it.
No opinions banking up, no whispers waiting.
It relaxed her somehow. She had spent three weeks bracing for the next sideways glance, the next pointed comment, and the next pitying hello.
Now, all that tension had nowhere to go.
Her shoulders dropped. Her jaw unclenched.
She hadn't even noticed she'd been clenching it.
Nobody on earth knew exactly where she was right now. Nobody cared. Nobody had an opinion about it. She was simply a woman in a borrowed bed in a borrowed house, breathing air that had nothing to do with Springfield, Illinois.
Evelyn closed her eyes. She got maybe one more thought in—something half-formed about whether she'd given the chickens enough grain—and then she went under.
***
A sound brought her back. Something downstairs. A boot on a wooden floor. Then another. Her eyes opened in the dark. The loft sat pitch black around her, the window showing nothing but cold stars and mountain edges against the sky.
Another sound. The scrape of something on the table. Metal on wood. A buckle, maybe.
Her heart was beating so hard she could track it in her own ears. Someone had come into the house while she slept. Someone stood downstairs right now, moving around like they belonged there.
She pulled the quilt back slowly, one inch at a time, and swung her feet to the floor. The boards groaned under her weight, and she froze. The movement below continued, unhurried.
She crept to the top of the stairs. Lamplight, warm and yellow, spilled up from the main room. She flattened herself against the wall and inched down, one step, then another, skipping the third because it had creaked earlier.
At the bottom, she pressed her back to the wall and leaned just far enough to see.
There stood a man. Tall and broad across the shoulders, he was standing with his back to her near the table.
He had a gun belt in one hand, unbuckled, and he laid it on the table with the easy habit of someone who'd done that same thing every night for years.
His coat already hung on the peg by the door, the same style of peg, she realized, as the coat in Sam's bedroom.
Dark hair, hatless, falling past his collar.
He reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head.
Evelyn's hand found the cast-iron skillet on the wall hook beside the stairs. Her fingers closed around the handle.
She stepped into the lamplight just as the man turned.