“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“He wrote it.”
Mercy waited.
Caleb stared at the grave.
“But he told me to mail it to the Cheyenne paper.”
Mercy slowly sat beside him.
“I didn’t.”
“What did you do?”
Caleb drew a breath.
“After Mama died, I found one of her letters.”
Mercy went still.
“It wasn’t the one in the doll. Just a draft in her desk.”
He looked at Mercy.
“It had your name.”
Her heart began beating harder.
“She wrote that she’d found a newspaper notice about a Mercy Calloway working at the boardinghouse in Saint Joseph. She wasn’t certain it was you.”
Mercy remembered the boardinghouse.
She had worked there eight months.
“When Pa gave me his marriage advertisement, I remembered.”
Caleb swallowed.
“So I sent it to the Saint Joseph Gazette instead.”
Mercy stared at him.
“The advertisement I answered…”
“I put it there.”
“You?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
Caleb’s eyes filled.
“Because Mama wrote something else.”
He handed her the envelope.
Inside was a brittle piece of paper.
Rebecca’s unfinished letter.
Mercy read.
I do not know whether the Mercy Calloway in Saint Joseph is my sister. I am frightened to write and discover I am wrong.
But sometimes I imagine her here.
She would laugh at Thomas because he thinks a burnt steak is supper.
She would teach Caleb not to carry the whole world simply because he is oldest.
Perhaps Eli would love her.
Perhaps all my boys would.
If anything ever happened to me, I think the worst thing would be leaving them without a woman stubborn enough to love them when they made themselves difficult to love.
Mercy’s tears blurred the final lines.
I hope someday I am brave enough to send this.
And if I am not—
perhaps Providence will find another way.
Mercy lowered the paper.
Caleb was crying openly now.
“I didn’t know if you were really her sister.”
“You sent the advertisement hoping I was?”
He nodded.
“I thought maybe you’d answer.”
“And if I hadn’t?”
“I was going to keep sending it.”
Despite the tears, Mercy laughed.
Caleb laughed too.
Then she looked at Rebecca’s grave.
All those months Mercy had believed she crossed Wyoming by accident.
That desperation had sent her.
That Thomas’s advertisement had been coincidence.
It had not.
A sixteen-year-old boy grieving his mother had quietly placed his father’s marriage advertisement in exactly the one newspaper where Rebecca Bell believed her lost sister might see it.
Mercy stared at Caleb.
“Does Thomas know?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Caleb shrugged.
“I figured he’d get dramatic.”
Mercy laughed harder.
“Oh, he certainly will.”
Caleb stood.
Then stopped.
“There’s something else.”
Mercy looked at him suspiciously.
“What?”
He nodded toward the cottonwood.
“Mama knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That you’d come.”
Mercy stared.
“That’s impossible.”
“Maybe.”
He smiled faintly.
“Three days before the fire, she told me she’d dreamed about her sister.”
Mercy’s skin prickled.
“She said you were standing in our kitchen making bread.”
Mercy could not speak.
“And all seven of us were sitting at the table.”
Caleb wiped his face.
“She said Eli was talking.”
A shiver passed through Mercy.
“What else?”
Caleb looked toward the house.
“She said Pa was smiling.”
Mercy followed his gaze.
Thomas stood on the porch in his wedding clothes surrounded by six impatient boys.
Eli saw her.
“Merry!”
He ran across the yard.
