A Choice Freely Made
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 2: Taking Root
Morning came to Brooks’ Crossing the way it came to all of Wyoming — without apology, and ahead of schedule.
Angela woke to the crow of a rooster somewhere beyond the barn and lay still for a moment, listening to the sounds of the ranch assembling itself around her: the low voices of hands passing beneath the window, the creak of the barn door, the distant percussion of hooves on packed earth. She had slept better than she deserved to, given everything, and the realization unsettled her mildly as she rose and dressed.
When she came down to the kitchen, Coulter was already there — sleeves rolled to the elbow, boots carrying the dew of early chores, the smell of woodsmoke about him. He set before her a steaming cup and a thick slice of bread spread with butter, then returned to the stove without ceremony, as though feeding a guest before dawn were simply the natural order of things.
“Best take something before we ride,” he said, not looking up.
Angela settled into the chair and lifted the cup. The warmth spread through her chest and unknotted something she hadn’t realized was still tight from the night before. She watched him move about the kitchen — economical, unhurried, each motion carrying the particular ease of a man entirely at home in whatever task occupied his hands — and found herself thinking that this was a man who had learned to live well alone. Not bitterly, not by default, but deliberately. He had built a home and then filled it with warmth even when there was no one to share it with.
That thought lodged somewhere she could not easily dismiss.
“You’re up early yourself,” he observed, setting his own cup across the table from her.
“I’m not accustomed to sleeping late,” she said. “The school day began at seven.”
He nodded, something quiet moving across his expression. “Then you’ll fit the rhythm of this place well enough. The ranch doesn’t sleep past five.”
They ate in the easy quiet she was beginning to recognize as his natural register — not the silence of men with nothing to say, but of one who considered words worth their weight and spent them accordingly. When the bread was finished and the cups emptied, he tipped his head toward the door.
“I’d like to show you how wide Brooks’ Crossing runs. If you’re willing.”
She was willing.
They rode out as the sun cleared the eastern ridge, flooding the valley in a light so clean and gold it seemed freshly made. Angela’s horse was a pale brown mare named Cora — steady, sure-footed, with the calm disposition of an animal that had carried uncertain riders before and bore no resentment of it. When Coulter reached to adjust her reins before they set off, his fingers brushed hers, warm and brief, and she felt the contact travel up her arm like a current before she had time to decide how she felt about it.
The prairie unfolded before them in waves of silver-green, still jeweled at the tips with last night’s dew. A hawk turned slow circles in the high blue above the eastern pasture. Angela breathed it in — the cold, clean air carrying the scent of wet grass and distant water — and felt something that was not quite peace but was perhaps its outer edge.
“The eastern field runs to that ridge,” Coulter said, gesturing with a nod. “Barley, mostly. The western pasture carries the cattle herd — about three hundred head now. Started with forty.”
She looked at him sidelong. “Eight years?”
“Eight years.” He said it without pride, simply as a fact. “First winter nearly finished it. Lost a third of the cattle, two horses, and most of the south fence in a blizzard that lasted eleven days. Rebuilt in spring.”
Angela said nothing for a moment. Then: “You stayed.”
“I stayed.” He glanced at her. “The West asks that of people. Whether they mean to or not, it makes them answer the question of how much they want the thing they came for.”
She held that thought as they rode on across the wide pasture, past the fence line that ran straight and true to the horizon. Memories rose unbidden — her father, years ago, taking her as a small child to the park on Sunday mornings, lifting her onto the back of the gentle horses that plodded the path by the pond. He had laughed, steadying her small hands on the mane, telling her to move with the animal rather than against it. Feel the rhythm, Angie. Don’t fight it. Trust it. She had never forgotten that. She had not thought of it in years.
The wind dried her eyes before Coulter could see them.
By midday they had covered the northern boundary of the ranch and turned south along the stream. Cottonwoods grew thick at the bank, their leaves turning and flashing silver in the breeze. The water ran clear and cold over smooth stones, cutting a bright line through the dark soil of the valley floor.
Angela dismounted and knelt at the bank, dipping her fingers into the current. The cold shot up her arm, drawing an involuntary breath.
“This stream has been here since the first settlers came through,” Coulter said from behind her. He had settled on a flat rock at the water’s edge, his hat resting on his knee, his gaze moving slowly along the far bank. “Wagons rested here. The first herds drank here through two dry summers when everything else failed. It kept this valley alive.”
She looked up at him. Sunlight filtered through the cottonwood branches, laying patterns of light and shadow across his face, and she was struck again by the quality she had noticed at the station — not merely strength, but something deliberate behind it. A man who kept the history of things. Who understood that a place was not only what it was today but everything it had survived to become.
“I leave it as a reminder,” he said quietly. “This land isn’t only mine. It belongs to whoever honors it.”
Angela rose and dried her hand on her skirt. She did not speak immediately, but she carried what he said forward with her as they mounted and turned toward Silver Creek.
The town appeared in the mid-afternoon, settled in a shallow valley between two long rises of grassland. It was modest — a single main road lined with wooden storefronts, a livery and forge at the far end, a mercantile and café near the center, and at the near edge, small and plain and squarely built, a wooden schoolhouse with a bell above its door.
Angela’s eyes went straight to it and did not leave it easily.
The townsfolk greeted Coulter with the warmth of genuine regard rather than mere courtesy — a shopkeeper stepping out to wave, a farmer pausing his wagon to call across the street, a woman at the well lifting a hand in greeting. He acknowledged each with a nod or a word, easy and unperforming. Angela rode at his side and felt the curious eyes that found her — not with scorn, in the main, but with the open assessment of a small community that noticed everything and formed its opinions slowly.
She kept her chin level and her eyes forward.
Coulter leaned slightly toward her without turning his head. “Don’t trouble yourself. Silver Creek looks at the person, not the color.” He paused. “Most of it, anyway. Give them a little time.”
The words were plain and offered no false comfort — he had not pretended the world was other than it was. But there was steadiness in them, and she found it held her more securely than reassurance would have.
They drew up before the schoolhouse as a gray-haired woman emerged from its doorway, wiping chalk dust from her hands onto a dark apron. Her face was angular and precise, her eyes quick and intelligent behind small spectacles.
“Mr. Brooks.” She nodded, then turned her gaze to Angela with open curiosity.
“Mrs. Hensley,” Coulter said. “This is Angela Parker, lately of Philadelphia. She taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and natural science for four years.”
Mrs. Hensley’s eyebrows rose. She stepped forward and extended her hand. “How wonderful. How genuinely wonderful.” Her grip was firm and direct. “We have forty-one children enrolled and one teacher — myself — who is neither young nor made of iron. Would you consider sitting in tomorrow morning, Miss Parker? Just to look. No obligation.”
Angela glanced at the schoolhouse door, standing open to the afternoon. Through it she could see the rows of wooden desks, the slate boards running the length of the far wall, a globe on the teacher’s table that had seen better decades. The smell of chalk dust reached her even from the step — a smell so familiar it was almost like hearing her own name spoken.
“Yes,” she said, before she had considered it. “I’d like that.”
Mrs. Hensley smiled with the satisfaction of someone who had hoped for exactly this outcome. “Eight o’clock, then.”
At the mercantile, the storekeeper — a broad man of sixty with a ready grin and ink-stained fingers — clasped Coulter’s hand and spoke warmly of a hay shipment that had come through ahead of schedule, and of the new roof on the back storeroom that had held through the last two storms without a leak. Angela listened quietly and heard the same note beneath each exchange: respect earned over time, through deeds rather than position. A man who had helped rebuild a roof. Who had sent word about a hay shipment. Who apparently kept a quiet eye on the welfare of the town around him without making a ceremony of it.
She was revising her picture of Coulter Brooks, and the revision unsettled her more than the original had.
On the road back, the late afternoon sun laid long shadows across the grass. Angela rode with her face turned slightly into the warmth of it, her hands easy on the reins, and felt — with a pang of something she could not name — that she was more comfortable in this saddle, on this road, than she had any right to be after a single day.
Coulter rode beside her, close but not crowding, his eyes on the horizon with the same watchful calm he seemed to carry everywhere. After a while he said, without particular emphasis: “Mrs. Hensley has been teaching alone for three years. Before that, there were two of them.”
Angela looked at him. “What happened to the other?”
“Married a farmer and moved north.” A pause. “Silver Creek has been trying to find someone since. It’s not an easy post to fill — the pay is modest and the winters are long.” He glanced at her. “But the children are good. Willing. Most of them have never had anyone show them that learning might be worth the trouble.”
She looked away, back toward the road ahead.
He said nothing more. He did not need to.
Two days later, on a morning when the sky was high and clear and the schoolhouse smelled of fresh chalk, Angela Parker stood before forty-one children and taught her first lesson in Wyoming.
She had not planned it. She had intended only to observe, to sit quietly at the back of the room while Mrs. Hensley took the morning session. But when the older woman had been called away by a small crisis involving a splinter and a great deal of noise from the younger grades, she had found herself at the front of the room with twenty-three faces of varying ages looking up at her with the frank, unfiltered curiosity that only children and animals can produce without self-consciousness.
She had picked up the chalk.
An hour later, Mrs. Hensley returned to find the room in a state of industrious quiet, each child bent over a slate, working through a problem Angela had set involving the measurement of a field. She had turned the arithmetic lesson into a question about the land they lived on — if a rancher’s pasture runs four hundred yards east to west and three hundred north to south, how much fence does he need to keep his cattle home? — and the children, who had largely found numbers an abstraction, were suddenly and thoroughly engaged.
Mrs. Hensley stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching. Then she removed her spectacles, polished them, replaced them, and said nothing at all, which was more eloquent than any praise.
That evening Angela sat before the fire at Brooks’ Crossing, her feet aching pleasantly and her mind still turning over the day. Coulter came in from the last round of evening chores, shrugged off his coat, and looked at her with an expression that was almost amusement.
“Mrs. Hensley sent word,” he said.
Angela looked up. “Oh?”
“She says you have the gift. Her words.” He settled into the chair across from her. “She’d like to discuss terms if you’re inclined to stay past your fortnight.”
The fire popped. Angela looked at her hands in her lap — the chalk dust still faintly visible at her fingertips despite washing — and felt something she had not felt in a long time. Not the fearful, provisional hope she had been carrying since Philadelphia, but something cleaner. Something that knew its own shape.
“I haven’t decided anything,” she said carefully.
“No,” Coulter agreed. “You haven’t.” And he let the subject rest there, which she was beginning to understand was his particular way of being kind.
It was on the fourth morning that Vince Davidson found her.
She had risen early, before the hands, and taken a basket to the edge of the wood where the wild berry bushes grew heavy along the fence line. The storm of two nights past had left the fruit swollen and dark, gleaming between the leaves like small polished stones. She knelt in the damp grass and worked steadily, the basket filling, her mind pleasantly empty of everything but the rhythm of the task and the sound of the stream nearby.
The blackbirds wheeled above the cottonwoods. The morning was cool and still.
Then hoofbeats — heavy, deliberate, with a rhythm that did not carry the even purpose of working cattle. Angela rose slowly, her chest tightening by instinct before her mind had identified the cause.
From the tree line came a rider. A gaunt man in his forties, bristle-bearded, with a hat slouched low to shadow eyes that caught the morning light with something flat and unpleasant in them. His horse was a gray with a mean set to its ears. The man rode with the loose, proprietary ease of someone accustomed to believing the ground beneath him was his by right.
He reined up ten yards from her and looked her over with the unhurried insolence of a man who expected no objection.
“Well now,” he said, his voice carrying a dry rasp, like a file drawn across rough metal. “A rare flower blooming out here. Don’t often see a colored woman bold enough to stroll Wyoming soil.”
Angela set her basket down. She made herself breathe. She kept her voice level and her eyes direct. “I’m gathering berries on this ranch. If you have business, state it and be on your way.”
He laughed — a short, humorless sound — and pressed his horse a step closer. Its shadow fell across her. “Name’s Vince Davidson. I run the spread east of the ridge.” His eyes moved over her with a slowness that was deliberate and cold. “Seems you’re staying on Coulter Brooks’ place. Man fancies himself something. Always has.” He tilted his head. “And you? What are you to him? Wife? Servant? Or just passing through like the rest of them?”
The words were designed to diminish, to reduce her to a category and then dismiss her from it. She had heard their kind before, in other voices, in other rooms. She knew what they wanted: to see her flinch. To see her look down.
She did not look down.
“That,” she said quietly, “is not your concern.”
Davidson’s expression shifted — not to anger, but to something colder and more considered, the look of a man recalculating rather than retreating. He opened his mouth to speak again.
“That’s enough, Davidson.”
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