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Part 2 — Worse Than Cold

The well was a quarter mile down a path glazed with ice. Jonas showed her once, without softening it, and waited for her to quit. Rebecca hauled the bucket with both hands, velvet sleeves soaked, and did not ask him to take it. By the third morning the biscuits were only mostly stone. By the fifth, the stove caught on the second match.

He still slept on the floor. She still did not explain St. Louis.

On the sixth night the wind found a gap in the chinking and the lamp shuddered. Jonas came in from the line with blood on his cuff and a split knuckle, and found her at the table with his spare shirt already turned for mending. She did not flinch at the blood. That was the first thing that did not fit the velvet.

“You said you’d survived worse than cold,” he said.

“I have.”

“That ain’t an answer.”

She tied off the thread. “My husband in St. Louis was not a widow’s grief. He was a man the agency would not list if I used his real name. He is the reason the letters were short. He is the reason I will not take tomorrow’s train, even if you put me on the platform yourself.”

Jonas was quiet. The scar on his jaw pulled when he set his jaw. “He coming up this mountain?”

“If he learns the name I used, he might try. Hale was my mother’s. The fare you wired is the only money he does not know I have.”

“Then he don’t learn it from me.” Jonas nodded at the stove. “You keep that fire. I’ll keep the trail. That’s the arrangement. Affection wasn’t in the letter. Protection was.”

She looked at him then, really looked, not at the size of him but at the fact he had not asked what she had done to deserve a man like that. “I burned the pork on purpose the first night,” she said. “I wanted you to think I would fail, so if I had to run, you would not be surprised.”

“You ain’t running.”

“No.”

A week later a stranger asked for Rebecca Hale at the Silver Plume mercantile. The storekeeper, who owed Jonas for a winter’s worth of pelts, sent word up the ridge instead of an answer down the trail. Jonas met the man at the switchback. City coat. City gun, worn wrong. The questions were polite until they weren’t.

“She isn’t here under any name you know,” Jonas said. “Turn around before the weather does it for you.”

The man measured the scar, the rifle, the drop beside the trail. He went down. Jonas watched until the trees took him, then climbed home to a cabin that smelled of coffee gone right and a woman who had barred the door from the inside until she heard his voice.

“He’ll try again,” she said.

“Let him. The mountain don’t care about his stubbornness either.”

That night he did not move to the bed. She did not ask him to. But she set his plate where he could reach it without crossing her shadow, and when the wind rose he fed the stove before she had to kneel for it. Cold terms, still. A transaction, he told himself. The lie was thinner than the chinking. Somewhere under the wolf pelts and the sulfur on her fingers, the wife he had not wanted was becoming the reason the cabin held through the dark, and Jonas Hargrave, who had no use for romance, lay awake on the floor and did not wish her on the dawn train.