The Mail Order Bride Arrived to Find Seven Children and No Mountain Man. She Stayed Anyway.

Chapter 2

She had not meant to place the advertisement. That was the first thing Pearl Avery would have told you, if you had asked her, which nobody did, because in 1875 a woman placing an advertisement in the Matrimonial Times was already a statement of purpose loud enough that the details did not matter.

She was twenty-eight. She had no family left in Ohio worth the name — her parents gone, her brothers and sisters scattered west and north like seeds thrown from a moving wagon. She worked in a boarding house in Cincinnati, sewing wedding dresses for other women, and she had sewn enough of them to know something most people never learn: that the women who married for safety were not safer, and the women who married for love were not happier, and the only marriages that held were the ones where both parties had looked at the thing in front of them and decided to tend it like a garden.

Nothing was going to knock on the boarding house door.