Tom refused to sing it.
Three days later Nora heard him humming it in the barn.
By November, Lily had begun waiting for him at the fence every evening.
“Tom!”
She would run toward him as though he had been absent for months instead of hours.
And every time, Tom felt something painful and wonderful twist beneath his ribs.
He told himself it was affection.
Nothing more.
He had learned the danger of wanting something too badly.
Nora had secrets of her own.
At night, after Lily slept, she sometimes opened the battered carpetbag hidden beneath her bed.
At the very bottom, wrapped inside a yellowed handkerchief, lay three objects.
A silver wedding ring.
A small photograph.
And a water-stained envelope bearing Tom Hale’s name.
She had carried them for six years.
The photograph showed a younger Tom beside Evelyn.
His hair was longer. He was smiling.
Nora had seen that photograph for the first time on the worst night of her life.
Six years earlier she had been living at an isolated stage station twenty miles south of the Red Willow River.
She had lost her husband to pneumonia that winter.
Three months later, she lost her newborn daughter before the child lived long enough to be named.
Nora had believed there could be no emptiness deeper than that.
Then, during the great flood, a rancher had pounded on the station door shouting that he had seen a woman tangled among branches near the river.
They carried her inside.
She was pregnant.
Bleeding.
Freezing.
And terrified.
Her name was Evelyn.
The baby came before sunrise.
A little girl.
Tiny.
Alive.
Evelyn lived long enough to hold her.
She kissed the infant’s forehead and whispered words Nora would never forget.
“Tell Tom…”
Her breathing broke.
Nora bent closer.
“Tell him his little star lived.”
Evelyn died before she could explain where Tom was.
The flood had wiped out bridges, roads, and telegraph lines.
The stage station keeper buried her on a hill above the river.
Nora searched the dead woman’s damaged belongings.
She found the ring.
The photograph.
And an envelope so soaked that most of the writing had dissolved.
Only two words remained clearly readable.
Tom Hale.
There were dozens of Hales in the territory.
And more Toms than anyone could count.
No ranch name survived on the paper.
For nearly a year Nora asked travelers, ministers, merchants, and stage drivers.
Nothing.
Meanwhile the baby survived.
Nora fed her goat’s milk with a cloth wick.
She slept beside her.
She walked the floor when fever came.
She sang to her.
She named her Lily because wild lilies had bloomed beside Evelyn’s grave.
By the time Lily was one year old, Nora loved her with the ferocity of a woman given a second chance at motherhood.
Eventually searching became harder.
Then impossible.
Six years passed.
Until Nora saw Tom’s advertisement in a newspaper used to wrap flour.
THOMAS HALE.
RED WILLOW VALLEY.
Something inside her had known.
She brought Lily west.
She told herself she was bringing a child to her father.
But when she stepped into the house and saw Evelyn’s photograph on the mantel, fear seized her.
