Chapter Seven
Her mind wandered where she'd been trying not to let it wander.
Sam.
Specifically, Sam last night, stirring the stew while she told him what to do.
Sam snorting at her joke about supper killing them.
Carrying her up the stairs with her hand on his shoulder and the stew smell in the warm kitchen and the whole thing feeling like…
like something she had no business feeling.
They'd talked. No arguing, snapping, or trading barbs across a room.
He'd told her about bounty hunting. She'd listened, and he'd mentioned Sarah talking about her, and she'd blushed like a fool.
He'd asked what brought her out here, and she'd lied. He'd let her lie; she could tell he’d been onto her, but she’d taken the kindness for what it was.
She'd woken thinking about him.
That was the trouble. She'd woken up in the loft with grey light coming through the window and the memory of his shoulder under her hand still sitting warm in her palm as if the warmth hadn't gone away overnight, and she'd lay there a full three minutes before her sensible brain caught up with her ridiculous one and reminded her of a few pertinent facts.
Fact one: She'd known this man for five days.
Fact two: He was her dearest friend's brother.
Fact three: She'd sworn off men not two months ago in the plainest terms a person could swear off anything, and she'd meant it, and the meaning of it hadn't expired just because a bounty hunter with grey eyes and a scar through his eyebrow had made stew with her one evening.
Fact four: She was leaving in ten days. Nine, now, maybe.
She sat up in bed and tested the ankle before she'd let herself think about Sam another second. There was nothing like a bad ankle for reminding a body of the practical world. It held better than it had yesterday. She rotated her foot in slow circles. It complained, but it didn’t scream, and she took that as progress and made herself move.
Sam had left before she'd come down. She'd seen his coffee cup by the wash basin, and no sign of him in the yard, and she'd figured he'd ridden for town again on whatever business a man like Sam Cooper had that took him to town two mornings running.
It didn't matter. What mattered was that the house was hers for the day, and she had a list of tasks the length of her arm, and none of the tasks on that list involved thinking about the way his shoulder had felt under her hand.
She swept the floor twice.
The chickens had opinions about the delay.
All eight of them rushed to the coop gate when she opened it, all red and brown feathers and indignant clucking that suggested she'd committed a crime against poultry by not arriving sooner.
She scattered grain. They attacked it, and she stood there watching them peck and scratch in the snow, these ridiculous, hostile little creatures, and something about the morning—the blue sky, the clean air, the simple stupidity of chickens—pulled her out of her own head for a minute.
Six eggs today.
She pumped water from the well to take to the horses and the cow, which she then milked. It went better this time. She still talked to the animal because she'd picked up the habit and hadn't shaken it. Hold still now. That's a girl. We're gettin' better at this, you and me.
Back inside, she set the eggs on the counter and studied them.
Six eggs. A fresh pail of milk. Flour, lard, salt, sugar.
There was a small tin of nutmeg tucked behind the herb jar that Sarah had clearly hoarded for special occasions.
Six eggs and fresh milk and a bit of nutmeg meant only one thing to a woman who'd learned to cook in a boarding-house kitchen.
Custard pie. The good kind. The kind Mrs. Krauss back in Springfield had made every Friday for fifteen years and had refused to write the recipe down because she believed a recipe you had to write down wasn't a recipe you knew well enough to cook.
Evelyn knew it well enough to cook.
She started the crust first because a crust needed to chill before it went in the oven.
Cut the lard into the flour with a fork, working quickly the way Mrs. Krauss had taught her, keeping everything cold.
Cold hands and a bad temper. Mrs. Krauss had said that a thousand times.
Evelyn had both. She added a splash of cold water from the pump bucket.
Just enough to hold. She gathered the dough and pressed it flat and rolled it out on the floured table with a glass bottle because Sarah didn't own a rolling pin.
Honestly. Evelyn made a mental note to say something about that in her next letter.
She set the crust in the pie tin and crimped the edges and put it out on the porch in the cold to firm up while she worked the filling.
The filling was the easy part if you had the eggs.
She cracked all six into a bowl and beat them with a fork until they'd gone pale yellow and a little foamy, and she added sugar and a good pinch of salt, and she poured in the fresh milk slowly while she kept beating so the eggs wouldn't scramble on her.
Nutmeg last. Just a scrape of it off the little tin, because nutmeg was one of those things where a small hand was better than a big one.
Mrs. Krauss had told her that too. Mrs. Krauss had told her a lot of things and Evelyn had remembered every last one because Mrs. Krauss had been the first grown woman in Evelyn's life to speak to her like Evelyn was a person worth telling things to.
That had been before David.
Before all of it.
Back when Evelyn had still believed that a life in Springfield could amount to something worth building.
She shook it off, fetched the crust in off the porch, and poured the filling into the crust carefully; a custard pie sloshed if you moved it wrong and slopped over the edges.
Then you ended up having a mess on the bottom of the oven that a person would still be scraping out three days later.
She got it into the oven box level and steady, and shut the door on it.
Now the pie had to sit. Custard pies were patient work.
You couldn't rush them, and you couldn't peek at them past the first check, because opening the door dropped the temperature and the filling would fall on you.
Mrs. Krauss's rule had been one peek at twenty minutes and then leave the pie alone.
Evelyn set herself to cleaning up the flour on the counter and the bowl and the fork and the pail, and she swept the floor a third time because pie-making left evidence everywhere.
She could do this. She could cook and clean and milk a cow and gather eggs and make a pie in a kitchen that didn't belong to her in a territory she'd never seen before a week ago, and none of it required David Morrow's approval, or Springfield's good opinion, or anyone else's permission at all.
That counted for something. She didn't know exactly what, but it counted.
Things had changed between her and Sam; she could admit that much. The sharp edges had worn down, or she'd gotten used to where they cut. They'd found a way to share a kitchen that didn't involve yelling or frying pans or threats, and that improvement alone should have satisfied her.
It should have.
But the hand on his shoulder. That half-second where she hadn't let go.
She kept coming back to that the way your tongue keeps finding a chipped tooth, you know you should stop, you know it doesn't help, and you do it anyway.
His shoulder had been warm under her hand and solid in a way that had nothing to do with muscle and everything to do with…
No. She knew where this road went. She'd walked it with David, all the way to the end, and the end had featured public humiliation, a town full of whispers, and a fiancé who'd traded her in for someone better within six weeks.
She would not walk it again. Especially not with Sarah's brother.
A man she'd known for less than a week. A man who lived on horseback and carried a gun for a living, and would be gone before the month turned over, because men like Sam Cooper always left.
That's what they did. That's what they were built for.
Friendship. That's what she could offer. That's what made sense. She could be his friend the way she was Sarah's friend.
It would have to be enough.
She said it to herself twice more while she checked the pie through the oven door at the twenty-minute mark. Once for good measure. The second time because the first time hadn't quite taken.
The trouble was that friendship—real friendship, the kind she had with Sarah—required no thinking about.
Sarah had never once occupied Evelyn's head at seven in the morning while she rebuilt a fire.
Sarah had never made her turn a phrase over and over in her mouth trying to figure what it had meant.
Sarah's letters arrived, and Evelyn read them, answered them, and put them in the tin box under her bed, and that was the whole of the shape of that friendship, and it was a good shape, and it worked.
What Evelyn had going on in her head about Sam Cooper was not that shape.
The pie came out set and golden on top with the specific little quiver in the middle that meant the custard had cooked through but not overcooked.
She set it on the counter to cool and stood there a moment admiring her own work, which she allowed herself because no one else stood around to do it, and a person had to take their victories where they found them.
***
Sam came back in the late afternoon.
Evelyn heard the mare first, hooves crunching through the snow crust in the yard, and then the barn door opening and closing.
She expected him to come in the way he'd come in yesterday — stamping snow off his boots, hanging his coat, going for the coffee, making some dry comment about the cold or the animals or whatever had occupied his day.
He came through the door, and none of that happened.
He hung his coat on the peg. Set his hat on the shelf.
Unbuckled the gun belt and laid it on the table.
All the same motions, all the same order, but something behind them had changed.
The ease had gone out of his hands. He moved through the routine like a man walking a path in the dark, following it from memory because his mind had gone somewhere else entirely.
He didn't look at the pie on the counter. Evelyn had set it there on purpose, right in his sightline, golden-topped and cooling and smelling like nutmeg and sweet cream, and he walked past it like it didn't exist.
"There's pie, if you're hungry."
He glanced at her. His eyes, those gray eyes that usually carried irritation or amusement or some dry opinion about everything around him, looked flat. Distant. Like shutters pulled over a window.
"Maybe later."
He crossed to his bedroom door. Opened it. Went through. Closed it behind him.
Evelyn stood in the kitchen with the pie cooling on the counter and the fire crackling in the stove and the late afternoon sun slanting through the window, and she waited for the door to open again. It didn't.
Something had happened in town. Something that had taken the man who'd snorted at her jokes last night and carried her up the stairs and almost smiled over a pot of stew, and replaced him with—whoever had just walked through that door.
She didn't know who or what that person was.
He hadn't given her enough to work with.
Just the flat eyes and the closed door and the pie sitting untouched on the counter and the silence filling up the kitchen like water rising in a well.
She sat down at the table. Looked at the pie. Then at his door.
What had gone wrong?