Page 12 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Three miles. Maybe four. In travel boots and a wool skirt with two bags, and the sun climbing higher by the minute.
“Ain’t no coach runnin’ out that way? No livery I could hire from?”
“Livery’s in town proper, ‘bout a mile the other direction. But I tell you what, if you’re headed to the Foster place, walkin’s quicker than doublin’ back and hirin’ a rig. It’s an easy road, mostly flat ‘til the last stretch. Nothin’ a healthy gal like yourself can’t handle.”
Grace tucked the letter back into her pocket.
Then she picked up the carpetbag in one hand and slung the satchel across her body and thanked the man, who tipped his cap and went back to whatever he’d been doing inside theticket office. She stood at the edge of the platform looking out at three miles of dirt road winding into country she’d never walked before.
Four days on a train. Eleven days of waiting before that. An entire life packed into two bags. And the man couldn’t be bothered to send a wagon.
She stepped off the platform and started walking.
***
She’d never seen so much sky. Back home, sky came in slivers between rooflines and mast tops. Here, it crushed down from every direction, enormous and blue and heavy with the kind of emptiness that could swallow a person whole if she let it.
She almost turned around twice.
The first time, about ten minutes in, when the station disappeared behind a rise and the road ahead stretched long and empty and the blister on her right heel popped and went from hurting to wet. She stopped. Looked back. The road south led to the station, and the station led to a train, and the train led to New York, and New York led to rats eating her hair on a pillow in a house that leaked in four places.
Not that she had the money for the ticket anyway.
So, she kept walking.
The second time came at the creek crossing, right where the station worker had promised. A ribbon of water over smooth stones, cold enough when she knelt to splash her face that it made her gasp and clench. She drank from cupped palms. The water tasted like rocks and snowmelt and absolutely nothing else. No iron. No rust. No Hudson River silt. Just clean.
And the cleanness of it nearly broke her, because clean water from a creek in Colorado meant she’d actually done it—left everything, everyone, the whole known world—for a man who couldn’t be bothered to send a wagon. She crouched there with wet hands and a throbbing heel and let the choice sit plain in front of her. Cross or don’t.
She crossed. Soaked one boot on the stones. Bore left at the cottonwood.
From here, the road tilted upward, and, soon enough, just as promised, a fenceline appeared.
Post and rail, rough-hewn timber, running straight and sturdy along the edge of the property in a line so clean it could only belong to a man with a particular way about things. The posts stood evenly spaced, each one planed smooth at the top, and the rails sat snug in their notches.
She followed it uphill until the gate came into view.
Iron, sure enough, with a heavy F forged into the crossbar. Beyond it, the ranch spread out across a grassy bench of land that leveled off against the slope of the foothill behind it.
A proper ranch. A real one. Two-story house, hewn log and clapboard, wide porch running the whole front, stone chimney on the east wall. Outbuildings. Fences. Livestock.
It existed.
The whole walk up, some back corner of her brain had braced for a vacant lot. A burned-out shack. A sign that saidGONE,CONDEMNED,or nothing at all. But this… this sat solid on the land as if it’d grown there, sturdy and settled and real in a way that knocked the anger sideways and replaced it with something worse.
Because if the ranch existed, then the man existed. And if the man existed and the ranch looked likethis—kept, prosperous, the kind of place a person could build a life in—then he hadn’t tricked her. He’d just forgotten her. Which meant she’d walked three miles uphill in travel boots to stand at the gate of a man who had everything she’d ever wanted and hadn’t cared enough to meet her at the train.
That stung deeper than a con. A con she could’ve raged against. This just made her small.
It looked solid. Settled. Real.
And from inside the house, muffled but unmistakable, came the sound of men yelling and a baby crying.
Grace stopped at the gate with both bags, pulling at her arms. Sweat plastered her hair to her temples. The blister on her heel had gone past hurting and into a throb. She’d walked three miles uphill in travel boots on an empty stomach after four days on a train, and nobody, not a living soul on this entire property, had come to fetch her.
The yelling picked up.
Something crashed. The baby wailed louder, the same way it did through the tenement walls back home, turning into the full-throated howl of an infant who’d been crying long enough to run out of patience and tip over into something wilder.
