Chapter Two
The room fell abruptly still.
Even the dog stopped moving.
The woman’s expression changed, not softening, only shifting, as if she had been given a new problem and liked it no better than the last.
The boy stared at him.
The girl’s crying dwindled into damp little breaths.
Nathan let the words settle, though saying them aloud felt stranger than he had expected. My house. After six years away. After prison, after California, after Sam’s death. The claim sounded harsher than it ought to have, and he knew it. Yet he could not take it back.
The woman’s fingers tightened around the edge of the table. “Your house?”
He removed his hat at last, if only because it seemed ridiculous to remain standing there with it on his head. “Nathan Briggs.”
Recognition didn’t come to her at once. She searched his face, found nothing familiar, then looked past him as if expecting someone else to step forward and explain the matter. No one did.
But the boy…
His expression shifted with mere recognition of a name he had heard before and wished not to know in person.
His small face hardened.
Nathan saw it and nearly flinched. He knew that look. Had seen it before, in men who had already decided what he was.
The woman recovered first. “Nathan Briggs,” she repeated, slower now. “You are Nathan Briggs.”
“Yes.”
The boy’s hands curled into fists.
The woman’s gaze flicked over him again, this time not as a stranger but as a story turned to flesh. Nathan knew that look too. She’d apparently heard enough to fit pieces together now. The name, the rumors, the unwanted arrival.
She straightened. “I see.”
He doubted she did.
The dog took that moment to shake itself, sending dried flecks of mud onto the hem of her skirt. She closed her eyes briefly, as if petitioning heaven for patience.
Nathan glanced around the room again and found fresh irritation rising. “What is happening here?”
The woman’s eyes opened at once, and if he had expected embarrassment, he was disappointed. “At present? I’m attempting to keep this household from collapsing while speaking to a man who walked in unannounced and immediately began making demands.”
“I made no demand.”
“You declared ownership from the doorway.”
“Because it happens to be true.”
“And if I had been alone?”
He frowned. “What?”
“If I had been alone in the house,” she said, stepping toward him now despite the disorder at her back, “with no children here to witness it, would you still think it proper to stride in and announce yourself in that tone?”
Nathan stared at her.
She was not tall. If anything, she had to tilt her chin to look him squarely in the eye.
But there was steel in her all the same, and some part of him, an unhelpful, unwilling part, registered that before anything else.
He had expected someone worn down by circumstance, perhaps meek with it.
Instead, this woman stood in the middle of ruin like a commander refusing defeat.
His annoyance sharpened.
“I was told the ranch was in need of me,” he said.
Her brows rose. “How fortunate for the ranch.”
Before he could answer, the boy darted forward and snatched a carved wooden horse from the dog bed near the hearth. The girl cried out as though the world had ended. The dog barked again and chased after the boy in renewed excitement.
“Daniel!” the woman snapped. “Give that back this instant.”
“No!”
“It is Eliza’s.”
“He broke mine!”
Nathan turned fully to the boy. “Enough.”
The single word cracked through the room more sharply than he intended.
Silence dropped so fast it seemed to strike the floor.
Daniel stopped where he stood, breathing hard, the little horse clenched in one fist. Eliza stared at Nathan with round, wet eyes, her doll pressed beneath her chin. Even the dog backed off two steps.
Nathan realized, too late, what his voice must have sounded like to children already frightened and grieving.
The woman’s expression tightened. “There’s no need to shout.”
He looked at her. “They were shouting already.”
“They are children.”
“They are out of control.”
Color rose in her face. “And you have been in the house less than one minute.”
“Long enough.”
Her eyes flashed. “You know nothing about what this house has endured.”
He almost said, Neither do you. The words made it as far as his teeth before he stopped them.
Because that, plainly, was untrue. Whatever else she was, she had been here.
She’d stood in this room after the accident, after the burial, after the endless small hours when children woke crying for parents who would never answer.
Still, his temper had found its footing now, and it would not easily lie down.
“If this is how matters have been run,” he said, “it is no wonder the place looks ready to fall apart.”
He shouldn’t have said that.
He knew it at once.
The woman went very still.
Behind her, Daniel’s eyes narrowed with a hostility so sudden and fierce it made him look older than he was. Eliza began to cry again, softer this time, frightened by the strain in the room, even if she could not follow the words.
Nathan had faced armed men with less discomfort than he felt in that moment.
The woman drew a measured breath. “I suggest,” she said, each word precise, “that you step back outside until you have remembered your manners.”
He gave a short, humorless laugh. “My manners?”
“Yes. Those. Unless prison and the city stripped you of them entirely.”
Heat flashed through him.
For half a heartbeat, he was no longer standing in Sam’s front room but back in a cell with fists clenched, hearing another man decide what he was and what he would always remain.
He looked at her, really looked, and saw that she regretted the words almost as soon as she said them, but not enough to retract them.
Good, he thought grimly. At least she had the courage to stand by her insults.
“You have a sharp tongue for a governess,” he said.
Her spine stiffened. “And you have a remarkable talent for making a difficult hour worse.”
A laugh burst from Daniel then, but it held no mirth. “You’re awful.”
Nathan’s attention shifted to the boy.
Daniel lifted his chin, defiant and wounded, and so much like Sam, it hit Nathan harder than any insult the woman had thrown. There was dirt on his cuffs, anger in his posture, and pain beneath all of it so naked that Nathan could scarcely bear to see it.
Awful.
Perhaps the boy was right.
Nathan removed his gloves from his pocket and set them on the sideboard with deliberate care. “I did not come here to quarrel.”
“No?” the woman replied. “You might have fooled me.”
He ignored that. “Where is Walter?”
That, at least, caught her off guard. “At the south pasture, I believe. He was meant to return before supper.”
Nathan nodded once. Walter would know what had happened here, what was expected of him, why no one had thought to warn this woman of his arrival.
The dog nudged his hand with a muddy nose. Nathan frowned at it until it retreated under the table.
He forced himself to speak more evenly. “And you are?”
Surprise crossed her face, as if she had not expected the courtesy after all.
“Rose Montgomery,” she said after a moment. “I was governess to the children before… before the accident.”
Her voice changed slightly on the last words. Softer, though not weaker. Nathan heard the care with which she stepped around grief, as one might avoid rotten boards on a porch one had not yet repaired.
Rose Montgomery.
The name suited her less than he thought it should. Roses brought softness to mind. This woman had thorns enough to draw blood.
He inclined his head. “Miss Montgomery.”
Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “Mr. Briggs.”
A gust of wind rattled the crooked curtain and shoved colder air down the chimney. Nathan glanced toward the window. The clouds had thickened, darkening the room by degrees.
Stormy weather indeed.
Eliza sniffled again. Rose immediately turned from Nathan and crouched beside her, wiping the little girl’s cheeks with the corner of her apron. The movement was instinctive, practiced, gentle in a way nothing else about the scene had been.
“Hush now,” she murmured. “No one is taking your horse. Daniel, give it here.”
Daniel hesitated
Nathan could feel the boy’s distrust like a living thing.
Finally, Daniel crossed the room and thrust the toy toward Rose, though his gaze remained fixed on Nathan with resentful suspicion. Rose took it and handed it back to Eliza, who clung to both doll and horse at once as if deprived of either might ruin her entirely.
Nathan stood uselessly by the door, suddenly too large for the room.
He had imagined this return a hundred different ways while riding north. In none of them had he pictured himself facing two half-wild, grieving children and a furious governess in a house that still smelled faintly of Sam’s pipe tobacco beneath the smoke and disorder.
His eyes moved to the mantle.
Sam’s hat was gone from its old peg. The Bible Sarah kept near the lamp remained, though a layer of dust sat thick on the top edge. A child’s ribbon had been tied around one of the candlesticks. Beside the hearth rested a pair of small boots.
Grief rose in him swift and brutal, rawer for having been delayed so long.
He looked away before anyone could read it in his face.
Rose stood, and Eliza pressed against her skirt. “You may leave your coat there,” she said, the words cool but no longer openly hostile. “If you intend to stay long enough for Walter to return.”
Nathan glanced at his coat, at the mud already drying on his cuffs from the dog’s welcome. “I intend to stay.”
Her eyes met his again.
There it was, that strain between them, immediate and uninvited. She did not want him here. Perhaps only because he was a stranger. Perhaps because of everything she had heard. Perhaps because his presence threatened whatever order she had managed to build from wreckage.
Or perhaps, he thought with a flicker of irritation, because she disliked being contradicted.
He hung the coat anyway, and the room seemed somehow smaller without it, as though the gesture committed him more firmly than words had done.
Daniel muttered something under his breath that Nathan did not catch, but Rose did.
“Daniel.”
The boy looked away.
Nathan watched him, watched the rigid little set of his shoulders, and felt an unease settle deeper in his chest. He didn’t know how to speak to children.
He knew even less how to speak to children who had lost everything and been told, no doubt, enough stories about him to fear or hate him on sight.
He’d come because Sam had asked him, in letter after letter, to come home.
He’d come because staying away any longer had ceased to feel like punishment and started to feel like cowardice.
He’d come because the ranch had once been theirs, and because there had been no one else to answer Walter’s letter.
Yet now that he stood here, among the remains of Sam’s life, all he could think was that perhaps he should have stayed away.
Outside, thunder rolled faintly over the hills.
Rose heard it too. She looked toward the window and then back at the unsettled room with the expression of a woman calculating chores against dwindling daylight. “Daniel, help me with those chairs. Eliza, come sit by the hearth. Muddy, down.”
The dog, apparently named Muddy in a triumph of accuracy over imagination, flopped obediently enough onto the rug.
Nathan moved without thinking. He righted the fallen chair and set it against the table.
Rose glanced at him, surprised.
He ignored that too.
Between the four of them, five, if the dog counted, they restored enough order that the room no longer looked as though a small war had been fought in it.
The work was awkward. Daniel resisted directions on principle.
Eliza remained close to Rose’s skirts and watched Nathan as if uncertain whether he might vanish or explode.
Rose kept a palpable distance from him except where necessity forced otherwise.
When Nathan bent to pick up the spilled sewing basket, he saw that several shirts lay within it, one with a patch half-finished at the elbow. Sam’s size.
He paused.
Rose took the basket gently from his hands. “Thank you.”
No one spoke for a minute. Rain began at last, a fine tapping against the windowpanes that would not remain fine for long. The house creaked around them, old and stubborn.
Daniel climbed onto the bench by the hearth, arms folded.
Eliza curled beside him with her doll in her lap.
Rose moved to stir something in the pot hanging over the fire, and as she did, Nathan noticed how tired she looked beneath the sharpness.
There were faint shadows beneath her eyes.
A line of strain between her brows. Hands reddened by work, too roughened for a woman who had likely not expected her life to become this.
He found himself wondering how long she had been holding this household together with no one but Walter to help.
The thought irritated him for reasons he preferred not to examine.
Without looking up from the pot, Rose said, “Supper will be plain.”
“I have eaten worse.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
He almost smiled at that, though the expression never fully formed.
Daniel noticed anyway. “What are you doing here?”
Children, Nathan thought, had no regard for timing.
Rose turned. “Daniel.”
“He was gone,” the boy said, glaring openly now.
Nathan held the boy’s gaze.
Honesty seemed the only possible answer, though he had never found it the easiest. “I received word about your parents.”
Daniel’s face shuttered, his expression hard to read.
Nathan wished the sentence back at once.
He tried again, more carefully. “Walter wrote to me.”
“You should’ve come sooner.” The boy’s voice was flat, almost matter-of-fact, which made it hurt all the more.
Nathan did not move.
“No one asked for my advice,” Rose said quietly, though whether she meant to rescue him or rebuke Daniel, he could not tell.
Daniel looked at the floor.
Nathan stood with the storm muttering at the windows, knowing there was no defense worth giving. The child was right. Sam had written for years. Nathan had stayed away because guilt had been easier to live with at a distance.
Until death had ended the choice.
“You’re right. I should have,” he said.
Rose looked at him then. Really looked.
Her expression shifted, not with forgiveness, certainly, but the first trace of understanding that he was not made entirely of arrogance and bad temper.
The moment passed quickly.
A harder knock sounded from outside, followed by boots on the porch.
Walter.
Thank goodness.