“I Haven’t Seen A Woman In 10 Years” — The Mountain Man Said, Then Kissed The Bride And Married Her

Chapter 2

In a boarding-house room above the milliner’s shop, Clara Win stood before a cracked mirror and tried to remember who she was beneath the borrowed wedding dress.

The satin was yellowed, the lace yellowed, the whole garment smelling of mothballs and a dead woman’s charity. Mrs. Henderson, the banker’s wife, had loaned it out of what she called Christian kindness, but Clara knew kindness when she saw it, and this was cruelty wearing a Bible. The dress sagged at the shoulders and pinched at the waist — a costume stitched by a stranger for a performance Clara had never agreed to give.

She touched the silver locket at her throat, her father’s last gift, pressed into her palm the night the fever took him. Inside: a photograph of her mother, dead fifteen years, and a coil of hair from a baby brother who had lived three days and never once opened his eyes. It was everything she had left of the family she’d loved, and soon, she suspected, even that would belong to someone else.

Her father had been a good man and a terrible businessman. He’d trusted the wrong partners, signed the wrong papers, and died owing more money than twenty honest lifetimes could repay. The debt had passed to Clara, as debts always passed to daughters, and with it had come the attentions of Harold Fitzgerald.