You’re going to eat me out of this house one day, Elijah.
He could almost hear her laugh.
Then the memory changed.
A telegram.
A stranger’s handwriting.
His mother sick.
Then dead before he could return.
Buried in a town he had never seen.
No final words.
No goodbye.
Only a wooden marker he visited months too late.
Eli looked down.
Half the biscuit was still in his hand.
For several seconds he could not breathe properly.
Then he lifted his head.
“Who baked these?”
Conversation continued for perhaps half a second.
Then stopped.
The silence spread outward from Eli’s table.
Cards froze above the green cloth.
The boy wiping the counter stopped moving.
The station owner, a thick-bodied man with a silver watch chain stretched across his vest, slowly raised his eyes.
Eli held up the biscuit.
“I asked who baked these.”
The owner’s expression changed.
It was subtle.
But Eli had spent enough years watching nervous cattle and dishonest men to notice subtle things.
The man glanced toward the kitchen.
Not with pride.
With concern.
“That would be Ada,” he said.
The kitchen door opened.
A young woman stepped through.
Eli’s first impression was not that she was beautiful.
It was that she looked tired.
Not the ordinary tiredness of one long day.
The deep kind.
The kind that had settled into a person’s bones.
She could not have been more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
Brown hair had been twisted into a severe knot at the back of her head, though damp strands had escaped around her temples.
Flour covered both hands.
A white streak crossed her cheek.
Her gray dress had been mended at one elbow.
Her faded apron was wet from waist to hem.
She stood just inside the doorway with her shoulders slightly curved inward.
As though she had learned to make herself smaller before entering any room.
The owner spoke quickly.
“If there’s a problem—”
“There isn’t.”
Eli looked directly at the woman.
“These are the finest biscuits I’ve eaten in two years.”
Someone near the card table chuckled.
Another man muttered something about Eli needing better taste.
Eli ignored them.
The woman did not.
For a moment she simply stared at him.
Then something passed through her face.
First confusion.
Then suspicion.
Then disbelief.
Finally—
hope.
So faint Eli almost wondered whether he had imagined it.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Her voice barely carried beyond the table.
Then she turned back toward the kitchen.
The owner watched her disappear.
Eli watched the owner.
That was the moment his uneasiness began.
Not because the man had done anything threatening.
Because he looked relieved once Ada was gone.
Her name, Eli learned from the counter boy, was Ada Bell.
Nobody seemed to know when she had started working at Crestfall.
Some said five years ago.
Some said ten.
The station owner, Silas Crowe, claimed Ada’s father had owed him money before dying and she worked to repay the debt.
“How much?”
Eli asked.
The boy shrugged.
“How long does she have left?”
Another shrug.
Eli glanced toward the kitchen.
“Seems a mighty long time to pay a debt.”
The boy lowered his voice.
“Mr.
Crowe says interest grows.”
That told Eli enough.
Outside, thunder rolled through the valley.
Inside, Ada moved through the room carrying plates.
