No debt.
No drinking.
No gambling.
Then Lydia found the sentence that made her smile.
I will not request a photograph. Photographs flatter people. Mountain winters do not.
“Not romantic,” Crowley said.
“No.”
“But practical.”
“I prefer practical.”
Twelve days later, Gideon met her at a frontier railway platform beneath a sky heavy with snow.
He was immense.
That was Lydia’s first thought.
Six feet four, perhaps more.
Broad shoulders beneath a bearskin coat.
Dark hair touched with early gray.
A roughly trimmed beard.
A nose that had clearly been broken at least once.
He looked at Lydia.
Then at her small canvas bag.
“Miss Fenwick?”
“Yes.”
He took her bag.
That was almost the entirety of their first conversation.
They married in a mercantile storeroom before the owner, his wife, and a circuit preacher.
Gideon slipped a plain silver ring onto her finger.
It was slightly too large.
Lydia expected him to kiss her.
Instead, he gave her a cold biscuit and a wedge of cheese.
“You hungry?”
She ate both.
Thirteen miles later, the civilized world disappeared.
And now Lydia sat in Gideon’s cabin staring at a piece of embroidery she had made when she was eight years old.
A piece supposedly destroyed in the fire that killed her mother.
Gideon pulled a chair toward the bed.
He remained several feet away.
“My sister’s name was Abigail.”
Lydia said nothing.
“She married a man named Vernon Pike thirteen years ago.”
“How?”
“Matrimonial advertisement.”
The words struck Lydia harder than any blow.
Gideon continued.
“Agent arranged it.”
Her mouth became dry.
“Who?”
He looked directly at her.
“Edmund Crowley.”
The fire snapped.
Lydia could hear her heartbeat.
“No.”
“Abigail came back here six months after she married Pike.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was thin. Bruised. Half-starved.”
Gideon looked toward the fire.
“I was twenty-four. Stupid enough to believe marriage gave a man rights over a woman I had no business defending.”
His voice roughened.
“Pike came for her three days later.”
Lydia already knew what Gideon was going to say.
Still, she whispered, “You let him take her.”
Gideon’s eyes closed.
“Yes.”
He swallowed.
“She begged me not to.”
Silence filled the cabin.
“She stood right there.”
He pointed toward the door.
“She said, ‘Gideon, he’ll kill me.’”
Lydia stared at him.
“And you sent her back?”
“I told myself marriage was a promise. That a wife couldn’t simply run away when things became difficult.”
His hands tightened.
“I was wrong.”
The words came quietly.
Completely.
“I have lived with that every day since.”
“What happened?”
“Eight months later Abigail came back.”
Gideon’s voice almost disappeared.
“On foot.”
Lydia looked toward the snow-covered wilderness beyond the window.
“In winter?”
“October. First snow had already fallen.”
He stared into the fire.
“She made twenty-six miles.”
Lydia imagined a wounded woman walking through mountains.
“She was bleeding when I found her.”
Gideon’s face became something Lydia had never seen before.
Not grief.
Something older.
Something grief had hardened around.
“Pike had discovered she stole papers from him. She escaped. He followed.”
“Did he find her?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
Gideon looked at Lydia.
“I killed him.”
The cabin seemed to shrink.
“He drew first,” Gideon said. “I don’t lose sleep over Pike.”
