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

Chapter 5

She told herself she wasn’t going to count the days. She counted them anyway — six, from the morning she’d ridden away from the Ferris gate with that quiet ember in her chest. Through six nights of telling herself it meant nothing. He was just a sick man. She’d have helped anyone the same way, the way her father had taught her. She believed herself for about four of those six days.

On Thursday morning she dressed carefully. Not differently, she told herself firmly. Not differently — just carefully. Her dark wool dress with the good buttons. Her hair pinned the way her mother had taught her, tight at the neck, neat at the temples. The clothes of a woman going into town to run errands. Not the clothes of a woman thinking about dark brown eyes that had looked at her like she was something worth puzzling over.

She stopped at the Ferris gate at seven o’clock precisely.

There was smoke coming from the chimney. That was the first thing she saw, and the relief that moved through her was stronger than she expected, stronger than she had any right to feel about a man she’d known for six days.

She tied her horse and knocked. He opened the door before she’d finished the second knock. Dressed, upright, the color fully returned to his face. He looked at her the same way he’d looked at that bowl of soup — like something he hadn’t decided yet whether he was going to allow himself to want.

You came.

I said I would.

A pause. A very Elias Ferris kind of pause — not empty, but full of something he was working out how to say. Come in, he said finally. Coffee’s on.

She hadn’t been inside since that first morning, since she’d found him on the floor. The house was different now — not warmer, exactly. The bones of it were still spare and functional, the house of a man who’d stopped expecting company. But there was a fire going. The dishes were clean. And on the table sat a plate covered with a cloth.

I made biscuits, he said, from behind her, with the careful flatness of a man who was not going to be embarrassed about making biscuits. You’ve been feeding me for a week. Seemed only right.

Grace turned and looked at him. You made biscuits.

Don’t look at me like that. A man can make biscuits.

She lifted the cloth. They were a little uneven, and one had a scorched bottom, and they were the finest biscuits she’d ever seen in her entire life.

They’re good, she said, after the first bite.

You haven’t tasted them yet.

I know they’re good.

And something happened then. Something small and enormous at the same time. Elias Ferris smiled. Not a big smile, not the kind that takes over a face — just the corner of his mouth, for a moment, just long enough to show her that somewhere behind eleven years of silence and careful distance, that small warm human thing still existed.

Grace looked back down at her biscuit so he wouldn’t see what that did to her face.

They drank coffee. They talked slowly at first, the way careful people talk when they both know what they’re doing might be something more than talking. He asked about her aunt. She asked about the property. He told her, matter-of-factly, about the Ferris spread — his father’s ranch, one of the first in the valley, nearly four hundred acres running up to the creek line. He told it the way you tell a history with respect and a certain distance, the way you talk about things that belonged to a time before everything changed. She didn’t ask what changed it. She waited.

When she got up to leave, he walked her to the gate. That surprised her. He hadn’t done that in the first six mornings — he’d watched from the doorway or the barn, but he hadn’t walked her out. Now he walked beside her, hands in his coat pockets, breath a small cloud in the cold. And at the gate he stopped.

Next Thursday.

Not a question. Next Thursday, she agreed.

She was three steps down the road when he said, Miss Calvert.

She looked back.

Grace, he said, just that, like he was trying the shape of it. If that’s all right.

It was the most careful thing she’d ever heard a grown man say. It’s all right, she said. Elias.

She rode to town with her cheeks warm despite the cold, and she did not examine a single thing she was feeling, because she knew that if she looked at it too directly, it would turn into something she couldn’t put away again. That was fine. She was starting to think she didn’t want to put it away.

The talk started on Friday. Her aunt heard it from the minister’s wife, who had heard it from three separate women at the dry goods store — which meant it had already achieved the particular velocity of a story that no longer needed facts to keep moving. The version making the rounds: Grace Calvert had been visiting Elias Ferris’s property alone, regularly, entering his house, staying for extended periods.

None of it was false. That was what made it effective.

Aunt Prudence was sixty-two, widowed young, and possessed of opinions that had survived twenty years in that town fully intact. She set a cup of tea in front of Grace and sat down across from her.

People are talking, Grace.

I know.

He has a reputation.

I know that, too. Cold man. Difficult man. Hasn’t let a soul onto that property willingly in longer than anyone can remember.

He let me in.

Her aunt studied her. Prudence had a way of looking at you that stripped away the unnecessary and left only the true center of a thing exposed. The only defense was stillness.

He didn’t let you in, she said at last. He was on the floor, and you opened the door yourself.

He let me come back.

Another long study. He made you biscuits.

Grace added, before she could stop herself: He made me biscuits.

Her aunt was quiet. Then: Lord help you.

Aunt Pru.

That man, her aunt said, wrapping both hands around her teacup, has driven off every person who’s ever tried to get close to him for eleven years. I’ve watched good neighbors be turned away at that gate. There is something in him that is broken. She paused. And broken things can cut you very badly, even when they don’t mean to.

Grace was quiet.

I’m not trying to warn you off, her aunt said more gently. I know what I see in your face. I wore it once, a long time ago, and I know there’s no warning off from it. She paused. I’m telling you to go in with your eyes open. That’s all.

My eyes are open.

Good. Her aunt stood, picked up her cup. Then drink your tea, and tell me about those biscuits.

But the talk did not stop at tea and concern. By Monday it had acquired a new dimension, and that dimension had a name attached to it. Cornelius Vance.

They ran the meat of it in Tom Mercer’s hardware store on Monday afternoon. Vance was fifty-three years old, come to the valley four years ago with money and ambition in equal supply, and he acquired land the way other men accumulated debt — steadily, systematically, always at the moment of vulnerability, always with the right offer at the right time. He owned eleven properties now. And the Ferris spread, with its four hundred acres and its water rights and its position at the head of the creek line, was the one piece of the puzzle he hadn’t yet placed.

He’d made Elias Ferris three offers in three years. All three refused.

Vance doesn’t like the word no, Tom said, leaning against his counter, arms crossed, the careful neutrality of a man delivering an opinion sideways. Especially not from a man who’s alone, and hurt, and suddenly got a woman making visits to his property.

Grace set down the nails she’d been pricing. What are you saying, Tom?

I’m saying Vance was in here Saturday morning, asking questions.

What kind of questions?

The kind a man asks when he’s building something. About you. About your situation. How often you’ve been riding out to the Ferris place.

Grace’s hands went still on the counter.

He’s always friendly, Tom said. That’s the thing about Vance. He’s real friendly right up until the moment he isn’t. He paused. I didn’t tell him anything that wasn’t already going around. But I thought you ought to know he was asking.

She rode out to the Ferris property that afternoon. Thursday was still three days away. But Tom’s words were sitting in her stomach like a stone, and she needed to see the smoke from the chimney. She needed to know things were still exactly as she’d left them.

Elias met her at the gate. He’d seen her coming down the road and come out to meet her, and the fact of that — the fact that he’d been watching for her — she stored away without comment.

You’re early, he said.

Something’s happened, she said. Or might happen. I thought you should know.