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

Chapter 8

In the way that children often understand things that adults are still negotiating, Lily figured out Caleb Monroe before any of the rest of them did.

It happened on the fifth day. Sarah was in the kitchen dealing with a weevil infestation in the lower flour barrel — grim work, done with the efficiency of a woman who has dealt with worse — and Lily was supposed to be in the children’s room. The morning was cold and bright and the yard outside the kitchen window lay in brilliant winter light, and Sarah was watching the window without quite looking at it when she saw something cross her line of sight.

Lily. Walking across the yard in her coat, following — at a careful distance of about twenty feet — Caleb Monroe, who was walking toward the fence line with a post-hole digger over his shoulder. He had not seen her. Or perhaps he had and simply had not acknowledged her.

Sarah set down the flour sieve and watched.

Lily kept the twenty-foot distance for about fifty yards. Then it became fifteen feet. Then ten. Caleb stopped at a damaged section of fence and set the digger down and began assessing the damage, and Lily stopped too, mirroring him — standing still, hands in her pockets, looking at the fence with the same analytical focus he was applying to it.

He looked at her.

Lily looked at the fence.

He went back to work. Lily watched.

This continued for an hour. Caleb dug and set a new post and tamped it in, and Lily watched from approximately eight feet away, and Sarah watched from the kitchen window, and the winter sun moved across the yard. At one point, Caleb said something — she was too far away to hear it. Lily appeared to answer. He went back to work. She went back to watching.

When he gathered his tools to return to the barn, Lily turned and walked back to the house at her own pace, independent, unhurried, not following anymore. She came in through the back door and pulled off her boots and looked at Sarah.

“He’s fixing the fence,” she said.

“I saw,” Sarah said.

“He said I could watch as long as I didn’t touch the tools.”

“That’s reasonable.”

Lily nodded with great seriousness and went to the children’s room, apparently satisfied.

Jacob, for his part, had been absorbed into the working life of the ranch with a hunger that was almost physical to watch. Caleb had taken him on the second morning with something between tolerance and interest, setting him to work mucking stalls in the barn, watching with quiet attention as Jacob figured things out — incorrect, then correct, then more efficient — and saying nothing unless it was necessary.

On the third day, he had put Jacob on a horse.

Sarah heard about this from Jacob himself that evening, in a torrent of words that was remarkable because Jacob rarely produced torrents of anything. He had ridden the length of the paddock and back. The horse’s name was Bess and she was the calmest of the three and Caleb said she was suitable for a beginner, which Jacob reported with the careful pride of someone who understood that “suitable for a beginner” was not a compliment but was at least an acknowledgment.

“He doesn’t talk much,” Jacob said, “but he shows you things. He showed me how to hold the reins. He didn’t say anything, he just — adjusted my hands.” He looked down at his hands as though they were slightly different than they’d been before. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “He does.”

“I think he’s okay,” Jacob said. He said it with the measured finality of an eleven-year-old rendering a verdict, which, Sarah had learned, was the most valuable form of assessment available to her.

She herself was learning the language of the ranch by a different method — through the house, which was telling her its history in the way that houses do, in neglected details and absent objects. The hooks by the back door, three of them, all empty — she hung Jacob’s and Lily’s coats there and left one empty and did not mention it. The shelf in the kitchen at exactly eye level that had been painted carefully at some point and was otherwise bare — she put a dried herb bundle there, tied with twine, and watched it hang for days before he glanced at it.

She was sewing curtains. She had found a bolt of heavy dark cotton in the general provisions store on her second trip to town — Martha Thornton’s doing, she suspected; it appeared on her supply list with a note that said only “for the house” — and she cut it by lamplight in the evenings after the children were asleep, sitting at the kitchen table with the house quiet around her and the fire down to coals.

On the seventh day, she put up the first pair of curtains in the children’s room.

Lily watched her do it with intense focus, standing in the doorway.

“Do they keep the cold out?” Lily asked.

“A little. Mostly they make it look like a home.”

Lily considered this. “So they’re for feeling things, not for doing things.”

“Sometimes,” Sarah said, “things that help you feel safe are the most useful things of all.”

Lily thought about this seriously, in the way she thought about everything. Then she said, “I feel safe here.”

Sarah stopped. She was balanced on the small stepstool she’d found in the storage room, both arms raised to hang the curtain rod, and she stopped completely for one breath, two breaths, and looked at her daughter standing in the doorway of this room that had been an empty shell a week ago.

“Good,” she said. Her voice was steady. “Good.”

She hung the curtain. The room looked, suddenly and immediately, like a room where someone lived. It was a small transformation, almost absurdly small — two pieces of dark cotton over a window — and it changed everything.