Chapter 1 The dust cloud rising from the westbound stage caught Harrison Lambert’s attention as he stepped out of the general store. A sack of flour balanced on his shoulder. His heart lurched with an emotion he had not allowed himself to feel in the six weeks since he had sent that letter back east….
Chapter 1 The snow had been falling for two days without slowing, and the world had been reduced to the color of ash and bone. Cora Whitfield could no longer feel her feet. She knew they were still there because she could see them — two dark shapes moving one after another through drifts that…
Chapter 1 The train was forty minutes late, which meant the small crowd waiting on the platform at Red Hollow had forty extra minutes to reconsider the wisdom of being outside in the first place. It was the kind of cold that didn’t announce itself gradually. It arrived all at once, the way a door…
Chapter 1 A single gunshot echoed across the vast Wyoming plains as Norah O’Connell fled through the darkness, her heart pounding like a stampede of wild horses against her ribs. She had endured her brothers’ cruelty for years. But tonight, as they held her down while she screamed for mercy, something inside her had finally…
Chapter 1 The moment Margaret Hollister walked into the Silver Dollar Saloon that autumn afternoon, the whole place shifted. I felt it like a change in air pressure before a storm. But I didn’t know yet that this moment would define the rest of my life. I was nursing whiskey at my corner table when…
Chapter 1 The drought that brought him home. Eliza Crow had three things left in her cabin that afternoon: half a canteen of water, a crust of hardtack, and the loaded rifle she kept by the door. The drought had killed everything else. Her garden, her hope, nearly her will to stay. Then she heard…
Chapter 1 Jack Mercer didn’t stop for towns. He hadn’t stopped for much of anything in twenty years. But he stopped for her. She was eight years old, barefoot on cracked concrete, a bruise the color of a storm cloud running from her jaw to her temple. She didn’t flinch when he climbed down from…
Chapter 1 Some love stories begin with a dramatic moment — a glance across a crowded room, a rescue in a storm, a letter delivered by moonlight. This one began with an argument about a chicken. Not a metaphorical chicken. An actual chicken. Specifically, the one belonging to May Whitfield that had somehow crossed the…
Chapter 1 The board orientation packet had thirty-seven pages and a glossy cover photograph of the hospital’s new pediatric wing. Daniel Holt had been holding it in his lap for twenty minutes without reading past page four, which was partly because he had already reviewed the acquisition documents three times and knew everything in the…
Chapter 1 Beatrice Chen was nine years old and had been told, very clearly, to stay in the staff room and not make a sound and under no circumstances go anywhere else in the house. She lasted forty-five minutes before she got thirsty. Her mother Nadia was asleep on the narrow couch in the staff…
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