Every Woman Wanted the Lonely Cowboy — Until One Fearless Woman Spoke the Truth

Chapter 1

The wind came off the mountains like a warning.

Sarah Jenkins felt it cut through the wool of her coat — the same coat she had patched three times since Missouri — and pressed her hand harder against Lily’s back to keep the girl from stumbling on the frozen planks of the boardwalk. The child was shivering. Jacob walked two steps ahead, spine stiff with a dignity that no eleven-year-old should have to carry, and Sarah watched him and thought: he knows. He has known for weeks. He counts the coins the same way she does, in the dark, when he thinks she’s asleep.

Silver Creek, Montana. Population four hundred and twelve, according to the faded wooden sign at the edge of town, though someone had scratched out the two and written a one in charcoal, then scratched that out too. The main street smelled of horse dung and pine resin and something frying — lard, maybe, or salt pork — and Sarah’s stomach clenched at the smell because it had been since yesterday morning that any of them had eaten a real meal.

She reached into her coat pocket and closed her fingers around the coins. Seventeen cents. She counted them without looking, the way you count a rosary, though she’d stopped praying the winter her husband’s cough turned wet and dark. A dime, a nickel, two pennies. Seventeen cents in November in Montana, with two children and no roof and no names in this town who owed her anything.

“Mama.” Lily tugged at her sleeve. Her voice was very small. “Is this where we’re going to stay?”

Sarah looked down at her daughter. Lily’s cheeks were wind-burned and her braids had come half-undone sometime in the wagon ride from Billings, and there was a small cut above her eyebrow from when the ruts had thrown them all sideways outside of Heron Creek. She had her father’s eyes — pale grey, watchful, too serious for a six-year-old — and Sarah could not look at them too long.

“Yes,” she said. “This is where we’re staying.”

It was not a lie. She would make it true.

A general store anchored the south end of the street, its window fogged with warmth from within. Sarah pushed through the door with both children close behind her and stood a moment in the heat, letting her lungs remember what it felt like. A stove roared in the corner. The place smelled of flour and lamp oil and dried apples. Behind the counter, a woman in her fifties looked up from a ledger — broad-faced, clear-eyed, not unkind.

“Help you?”

“I’m looking for work,” Sarah said. She did not preamble. She had learned in six months of traveling west that preamble was a luxury of people who had time to waste. “Any kind. Washing, mending, cooking, hauling. I have two children but they work too. My son is eleven and capable.”

The woman studied her. Not with cruelty, but with the careful attention of someone who has seen many desperate people come through a door and learned to read them quickly.

“Where you coming from?”

“Kansas, most recently. Before that, Ohio.”

“Husband?”

“Dead two years.”

The woman set down her pen. She introduced herself as Martha Thornton, wife of Tom Thornton who owned the livery stable at the north end of town. She said there was not much work in Silver Creek in November, which Sarah already knew — November was the month work vanished everywhere. She said the sawmill had laid off its seasonal men. The two hotels were staffed through winter. The schoolteacher position had been filled in September.

Sarah listened to all of it and did not let her face change. Beside her, Lily pressed against her hip like a small animal seeking heat, and Jacob stood absolutely still, listening the way he always listened now — with his whole body, taking in information the way a much older person would, storing it.

Then Martha Thornton paused. She tilted her head slightly, the way a person does before saying something they’re not entirely sure they should say.

“There is one thing,” she said. “Though I don’t know that it’d suit. It’s not exactly a proper position.”

“Tell me,” Sarah said.

Martha looked at the children, then back at Sarah, and her expression shifted — something between pity and a strange, calculating hope. She leaned slightly forward on the counter.

“You know Caleb Monroe?”

Sarah did not know Caleb Monroe. She had been in town for eleven minutes.

“Tell me,” she said again.

And Martha Thornton told her. And Sarah stood very still, holding her seventeen cents in her fist, and listened to everything, and did not once look away.

Outside, the wind picked up. Snow was starting, fine as salt, sifting down from a white sky. Jacob, sensing something shift in his mother’s posture, turned and looked up at her. She met his eyes briefly — her dark ones and his, which were hers exactly, brown and steady and afraid of nothing they could see coming — and she gave him a small nod that meant: I have a plan. I always have a plan. Trust me.

What she did not tell him, what she did not say aloud to anyone in that warm-smelling store, was the other thing she was thinking: that plans required nerve, and nerve required not thinking too hard about what would happen if you failed.

She had seventeen cents.

She had a plan.

And she had until Thursday.