“Your Translator is Lying!” — Widow’s Daughter Warns Millionaire Cowboy in Fluent German Before Deal

Chapter 3

Something moved across his face. Not gratitude, exactly. Something harder than that, and sadder.

How long? she asked quietly. Have you been on this floor?

A long silence. Since yesterday morning, he said at last.

Grace absorbed that. Yesterday morning. He had lain here through a whole day and a whole night and into the next morning, no fire, temperatures near zero, and no one had come. No one had thought to look up at the sky and notice there was no smoke rising from the Ferris chimney.

Is there anyone I should send for? she asked. Family. A friend.

The look he gave her then answered without words. It was the look of a man who had made a decision, or had had one made for him by the years, that he was going to be his own family, his own friend, his own everything. And it had worked — right up until the moment it didn’t.

No, he said.

All right, she said. Then we’ll manage.

She went through his kitchen with the brisk economy of a woman who had fed other people’s children and mended other people’s fences and buried her own sorrow under the useful weight of being needed. She found dried beans. Salt pork. Coffee, flour, a small crock of lard gone a little rancid — not enough to matter, for a sick man who needed hot food more than he needed fine food.

She was halfway through slicing the salt pork when he spoke from the other room.

Why are you doing this?

His voice was stronger than it had been, the fire already working on him, but it still had that roughened quality, like a hinge that hadn’t been oiled in too long.

Because it needed to be done.

I didn’t ask you.

No, she agreed. You didn’t.

A pause. I don’t take charity.

Good. I’m not offering any. I’m making soup because there’s a sick man in the next room, and I’d have done the same for one of those horses if they could eat soup.

She heard him make a sound. It might have been a laugh. Too quiet and too short to be sure.

By the time she brought him the soup — not her best work, but hot, thick, honest — he had pulled himself up against the wall, wrapped in the blanket, looking proud and miserable in equal measure. She set the bowl on the floor in front of him and sat down across from him.

You’re going to watch me eat.

I want to make sure you do.

He picked up the bowl. His hands were still shaking, but steadier than before. He ate three mouthfuls without speaking, and she watched the color creep back into his face, slow and uncertain, like sunrise after a long night.

I remember you, he said eventually. September. The corn.

I remember you, too. You gave it back.

I didn’t need it.

I know, she said. That was clear.

He looked at her sideways over the rim of the bowl. There was something in his expression she hadn’t expected. Not gratitude, not embarrassment, though there was a little of both. Something sharper underneath. Something almost like curiosity.

Most women in town, he said carefully, would have kept riding. Told themselves it wasn’t their concern.

Most women in town probably have better sense than I do.

Why didn’t you?

She could have given him a simple answer. She had simple answers ready. It was the right thing. Anyone would’ve done it. She couldn’t leave those horses. All of them true. None of them complete.

Because I know what it looks like, she said finally. When somebody’s been alone so long they’ve forgotten how to let themselves be found.

The words sat between them. Elias Ferris stared into his soup bowl. I don’t know what you mean by that.

Yes, you do.

He didn’t argue. That alone told her something.

He finished the soup, clean to the bottom. She collected the bowl without commenting. She added wood to the fire, checked his temperature again — still too high, but down — and told him he needed to sleep, and drink as much water as she could get into him before she left.

You’re leaving.

The question surprised her. It seemed to surprise him too, from the way his expression shifted.

I have to get back before dark, she said. I’ll come back tomorrow morning to check on the horses.

You don’t have to.

I know.

She was pulling on her coat when he spoke again from his place against the wall, not looking at her.

Miss Calvert.

She turned.

The horses, he said. He stopped, working out the shape of something that didn’t come easily. They haven’t been watered right, either. The youngest — the paint. She’s been off her feed for a week. Something’s not right with her left foreleg.

Grace looked at him. He was not asking her. He was giving her information and letting her decide what to do with it, and calling it something other than asking. Because asking wasn’t something Elias Ferris had practice at.

I’ll check her in the morning, Grace said.

She rode back toward town through the gathering dark, heart doing something she did not permit herself to examine. And she thought about eleven years of closed gates and about the neat stack of wood a man split for a winter he never expected to survive, and about an oilcloth-wrapped bundle she’d glimpsed on the mantel, the only ornament in a house that had none.