Tom looked at her.

“Why did Mama have two?”

Hattie blinked.

“What?”

Tom stared at the babies.

“The midwife said one.”

Silas frowned.

Tom looked from Asa to Mercy.

“Before I rode for supplies last month, Doc Hollister said there was one heartbeat.”

Hattie stared.

“But Mama had twins.”

Tom slowly shook his head.

“No.”

Silence spread across the snow.

Hattie remembered the birth.

Mama screaming.

Hattie boiling water.

The first baby arriving.

Then—

A knock at the door.

Hattie had forgotten.

A knock during the storm.

Mama had screamed at her not to answer.

But later, while Hattie was fetching water—

Someone had entered.

A woman.

Bleeding.

Hattie had thought she was dreaming.

She remembered Mama shouting.

Then the second baby’s cry.

Her memory rearranged itself.

Mercy wasn’t Hattie’s sister.

Tom looked at the tiny girl.

“Where did she come from?”

A voice answered from behind them.

“From me.”

Everyone turned.

Silas Brennan had gone completely white.

A woman stood on the road.

One of the territorial marshals had brought her in his wagon.

She was thin, exhausted, wrapped in blankets.

But alive.

Silas whispered one word.

“Anna?”

The woman began crying.

Hattie looked at Silas.

“You know her?”

Silas couldn’t speak.

Anna Brennan was Silas’s younger sister.

Everyone in the valley believed she had died two months earlier while traveling east.

She hadn’t.

Anna had discovered Vale’s operation while working as a clerk.

She found records proving he had murdered settlers and stolen their land.

Vale discovered what she’d done.

Anna escaped while pregnant.

She rode toward the Pell cabin because Tom was one of the few men she trusted.

She arrived the night Mrs. Pell went into labor.

Anna gave birth to Mercy inside the same cabin.

Then Vale’s men arrived.

Mrs. Pell hid Anna beneath the floorboards.

Hattie, terrified and exhausted, never understood what was happening.

Anna escaped before dawn carrying Vale’s ledger.

But she was too weak to take Mercy.

She left her with Mrs. Pell, intending to return.

Then she collapsed miles away.

A trapper found her.

For weeks she hovered near death.

When she finally recovered enough to speak, she told the territorial marshal everything.

That was how Tom had been believed so quickly when he reached Bannack.

Two witnesses.

One story.

One conspiracy.

Silas walked toward his sister.

He touched her face.

“I buried you.”

“I know.”

“I put a stone beside Mama.”

Anna smiled through tears.

“Then I suppose you’ll have to move it.”

Silas laughed and cried at the same time.

Hattie looked down at Mercy.

“So she’s yours?”

Anna approached.

“Yes.”

Hattie tightened her arms.

Anna stopped.

She understood immediately.

“You kept her alive.”

Hattie nodded.

“She almost died.”