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

Chapter 2

Caleb Monroe, Martha Thornton explained, owned six hundred acres northeast of town. Not the biggest spread in the county — the Hargrove brothers held that distinction with their twelve-hundred-acre operation to the south — but substantial, well-run, the kind of land that looked after itself when the man who owned it paid attention. Which Caleb Monroe did. Relentlessly. Almost pathologically, according to some people in Silver Creek who had opinions about such things.

He was forty-one years old. He had lived alone on that land for ten years. Alone meaning completely, entirely, stubbornly alone. No hired hand who slept in the house. No woman who came to cook. No neighbor invited for Sunday dinner. The two men who worked his cattle operation lived in a bunkhouse two hundred yards from the main structure and were reportedly under the impression that their employer was, as one of them had put it to Tom Thornton after a third whiskey at the Silver Creek Saloon, “the most agreeable unfriendly man I’ve ever worked for.”

Martha told Sarah all of this leaning on the counter of her general store, in the measured way of a woman who was delivering information and making a judgment simultaneously. The children had been settled near the stove with a heel of bread Martha produced from somewhere under the counter without fanfare — a gesture of matter-of-fact kindness that made Sarah’s throat tighten and which she would remember for years.

“Why does he live alone?” Sarah asked. “By choice?”