Her posture motionless as she migrated a cascade of thoughts, seemingly understanding all that had been hidden. Then, within the breadth of a blink, the moment passed. I wondered whether I’d actually glimpsed her disarray or imagined it entirely. She stepped backward, straightened the draping of her bodice, as if putting herself away, as if she must, furiously, clutch onto control.
“Homesteading was a childhood fantasy,” she said. “By God above, you must become less histrionic.”
But it hadn’t been a fantasy, not for me. All our years planning had felt like a promise. Underneath it all, that was the crux of my heartbreak. My dreams—lost. My belief in others, shattered.
“You’ve been moody and ill tempered for weeks,” she continued, “since we announced our engagement.” Her expression static, her ivory skin now shaded ghost white. “Can’t you just move on, stop throwing this tantrum?” She gestured at me, at my heartbreak, like I was some overreacting toddler.
I didn’t recognize this woman who’d replaced my kind, demure sister. When losing an argument, when afraid or defensive, Magnolia often lashed out with a small swipe, an underhand insult or a petty observation. But she’d never responded like this. I supposed, after losing her parents and home as a young child, she couldn’t allow life to slip through her fingers, forever afraid of losing safe harbor. A squirrel clattered up the loblolly pine, the noises of the forest rising as dawn slipped away from the day. She adjusted her stance, and a greenbrier thorn caught on her cloak. She looked over her shoulder, unwound it from the white wool. Tranquil and unruffled, as if she wouldn’t allow herself to recognize that everything between us had gone to ruin.
“You’re clasping onto him,” I said, “just as you’ve always clasped onto me. Do you even love him?” I gripped the yellow daisies at my shoulders, palms sticky with apple sap. “I’m leaving, and you’ve never been brave enough to do anything by yourself. Because you can’t imagine living any way but boring, predictable, safe.”
Dirt from the forest floor smudged the tiny bluebells embroidered on her hem. She bent and picked up her basket, her once-fragile profile hardened. She’d broken and re-formed into something stronger.
“You’ve never had any restraint. I wonder why I thought anything would change,” she said. “Just make it through our wedding day without embarrassing me.”
And then she turned and walked through the copse, shoulders tight, her ivory cape rippling behind her. The air scented tart and coarse, of winesap apples and faraway woodsmoke. The memory unraveled, and I was once again in Oklahoma Territory. Moisture from my flask seeped through my sleeve, the bitter scent of applejack, the woodland timberline faraway, as if the forest wasn’t actually there. Stot stared at the sky, jaw loosened, as if he readied to speak. But unlike the other men I’d run across, he wouldn’t fill silence with platitudes. A norther whooshed, freezing the heat along my arms.
He adjusted his legs, something like a wince carved beside his eyes. He scratched parallel lines down his neck. “It’s dreadful to fancy someone you can’t have.”
My stomach dropped out below me. I picked at some wild rye stuck to the needlepoint on my bodice. “It is.”
He cleared his throat and tugged at his collar. I studied the prairie’s many shades of black, like different weights of charcoal pigment pressed across the landscape.
“So you fixing to tell the marshal about the bodies or not?” he asked.
“Are you kidding me? No questions, comments,” I said. “Do you ever react to anything?”
“React?”
“Are you aghast?” I asked. He poured some whiskey in my decanter and handed it to me. “Don’t you want to know why?”
“Your past is my business none,” he said. “Unless you’re itching to tell me more.”
“Assuredly not.”
He leaned over his lap toward me, wickedness edging his mouth. “Course you do.”
“I won’t give excuses, explain it away. It was appalling.”
“So’s everyone’s past.”
Was that it, then? Was he remaking himself as well?
“Yours?” I asked.
He thumbed his pocket watch, the ivory dial uncanny in the surrounding atmosphere of grays and browns. “You watch others fear me, you know my reputation: Of course my past is full of depravity.”
“I confessed my betrayal of the person I love most,” I said. “What’s all this treachery you’re lugging about?”
He gazed at the silhouette of the woodland, beyond my land, into time and distance. The hollows deepened beneath his cheekbones, his hat in repose on the grass, dull black crown pointing away. He glanced back—I held his gaze, dew crisp in the air.
“I killed my wife.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
You had awife?”
My fingers fanned over my collarbone, my eyes surely wide. The moment tipped, lopsided, as if something nameless had swallowed up the meadow in one gulp.
