“You Cook and Stay Out of My Way,” the Mountain Trapper Said — Until Her Hidden Scars Changed Eve…

Chapter 8

Martin Hale had been a respected merchant in Cincinnati.

He had gone to church. He had a good, firm handshake and a reputation for charity that was spoken of in the right circles. He gave to the orphanage and sat on the board of the bank and stood up at funerals and said the right things in his warm, measured voice, and people liked him. People trusted him. People thought Nora was the luckiest woman on the Ohio River.

He had a taste for control that he exercised behind closed doors, with a patience that she — at twenty-three, newly married, desperately eager to be a good wife — had mistaken for calm.

When she broke something, or spent money the wrong way, or said something at a dinner table that embarrassed him, he did not shout. He never shouted. He simply waited — through the meal, through the evening, through whatever company they were keeping — until they were alone. And then, with the same patience, he made certain she remembered.

“Please don’t,” Nora said to the ceiling. Her voice had gone flat and matter-of-fact, the way a person talks about old damage when the worst of the feeling has burned away. “Please don’t was the whole prayer of my marriage. I said it so often I stopped hearing myself say it.”

The burns on her arm — he had kept a box of good cigars on his desk, and a silver lighter, and he had been a man who believed in symmetry. Six of them. Seven. She had lost count of the exact number and had stopped counting the ones she could not see.

Her right hand had been broken in the second year of marriage. A hairline fracture across two knuckles, the doctor had told her, consistent with a fall. She had agreed with this diagnosis. The alternative — saying what it was actually consistent with — would have solved nothing and cost her everything. The hand had never healed straight.

There had been a baby, once. A loss in the fifth month, and Martin had grieved, and his family had grieved, and in the way of the well-dressed Cincinnati machinery of them, they had found it simpler to grieve by finding fault with her. She had been careless, they said. She had not taken care of herself. She had lost the child because of some failing in her that they could all see and none of them could name.

Martin had died of a coronary at fifty-one. He had been sitting in his study with his ledgers, and he had simply stopped, and the doctor had said it was quick, and Nora had stood at the funeral in black and had felt nothing but a vast, exhausted relief that she was ashamed of and could not help.

His family — his older brother Preston, his sisters, the whole machinery of them — had not forgiven her for outliving him. She had been cold to him, they said. Difficult. Ungrateful. They had made it clear, in a hundred small ways, that her place in their world was contingent on their goodwill, and that their goodwill had been withdrawn.

When she had quietly taken her small savings from the household accounts and answered a newspaper advertisement for a housekeeper in Idaho Territory, Preston Hale had been furious in the way of men who are accustomed to owning things.

“He doesn’t want me back,” Nora said. Her voice was flat. “He wants the story to end the way he wants it to end. He can’t stand that I left. He can’t stand that I chose the wilderness over his table. A woman who walks away from the Hale family is not a woman who is allowed to be happy. She is a problem to be solved.”

“He’ll try to find you,” Gideon said. It was not a question.

“He already has people looking. By now he’ll have hired someone proper — someone with training, with patience. Preston doesn’t move until he has every piece on the board, and then he doesn’t lose.”

She turned her head to look at him. In the firelight, her face was thin and pale, her eyes too large in their hollows.

“I’m sorry. I should have told you before. I should not have brought this to your door.”

“Yes,” Gideon said. He was not gentle about it, but he was not angry either — just honest, the way he was about everything. “You should have.”

She waited for the rest of it. For the calculation, the ledger, the tally of what her trouble would cost him and what he would expect in return. She had spent eight years learning to wait for exactly that.

Gideon Vane stood up. He went to the doorway and stopped.

He looked back at her — thin and pale against the cot, her right hand resting on top of the blanket in the firelight, the scars in plain sight for the first time since she had come to this house.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “We’ll deal with Preston Hale when he becomes a problem.”

She wanted to tell him that he did not understand. That men like Preston Hale had money, and lawyers, and patience, and that money and lawyers and patience always won in the end. That she had seen it win a hundred times. That the only way to beat a man like that was to not be there when he arrived.

But the fever was pulling her back down, and Gideon Vane, she had come to understand over two months of watching him, was a man whose word meant precisely what it sounded like it meant.

She closed her eyes.

She slept without dreaming.