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The promise stood between them, modest enough to keep and important enough to matter.

Eden moved the bedside chair nearer and sat without releasing his hand. Jesse could hear Bass speaking with Whit in the front room. Soon the marshal would come, and they would have questions to ask.

For the moment, Eden stayed, and Jesse let himself enjoy her company without trying to bargain for another minute of it.

Chapter Seventeen

Eden folded the telegram and slipped it into her pocket. She had read it often enough to know every word. Reading it again would tell her nothing about Josiah.

Jesse slept in the room behind her, one hand resting on the blanket where hers had been a little while earlier. He kissed her knuckles before she left his bedside. At the memory, her heart warmed even as she worried over the message from Missouri. She may never wash her hand again.

Memories from the day swirled through her mind. Three years of believing a wagon wheel had failed, when perhaps someone had arranged for it to fail.

She could still see Josiah sprawled in the mud, Mama calling his name, and Papa kneeling beside the broken wheel. Eden had scarcely thought about the wheel since. There had been too much else to do.

She stepped into the clinic’s front room.

Emily sat beside the stove, mending a shirt that looked large enough to belong to Bass. Carolina was at the table, and Nate stood at the washstand. Bass had taken up his customary post by the window. Rose Arden slept in a chair with her shawl pulled around her shoulders.

Emily put aside her sewing. “How is Jesse?”

“Sleeping. At last.” Eden held the telegram between her fingers. “I need to send a wire.”

Bass straightened. “To Missouri?”

“To Laurel. Josiah’s wife.” She drew a breath. “Mama says she’s overwhelmed, but I’d rather hear from Laurel herself.”

Carolina rose. “That’s sensible.”

“It’s overdue,” Eden admitted. She had spent so many years interpreting Josiah’s every expression she had scarcely considered how he and Laurel might speak to one another when she wasn’t there.

Bass glanced toward the street. “No one goes to the telegraph office alone until Rusk is found.”

“I wouldn’t dream of depriving you of the chance to organize an escort.”

Emily’s smile came and went. “I’ll walk with you.”

“I will,” Carolina said. “Emily ought to put her feet up before Bass wears a path through the floor worrying over her.”

“I heard that,” Bass said.

“You were meant to.”

Eden smiled, grateful for the brief reprieve. “Will you stay with Jesse, Emily? I told him I’d be nearby.”

“Of course.”

Bass called for Tater to accompany them. Eden accepted the escort without argument. After Crowley had entered the clinic through a supposedly barred door, she had no desire to test her luck.

Outside, the storm had passed. Water ran along the ruts in the street, and the air smelled of wet earth and woodsmoke. Tater kept a discreet distance while Eden and Carolina walked toward the mercantile, where the telegraph office occupied a small room behind Mr. Arden’s desk.

For a block, neither woman spoke.

Then Eden said, “I want to know who hurt my brother.”

Carolina glanced at her. “I know you do.”

“I thought I wanted to go straight home when I read the telegram. Now I don’t know what I want.”