Chapter 3

LilLi

The preacher’s name was Reverend Aldous Pratt, though I would not learn that until he said it himself, introducing himself to me the way a man does when he suspects the bride in front of him knows nothing at all about the ceremony she is about to enter. His church was small and plain, four rows of benches and a window behind the pulpit that let in more dust than light, and it was empty save for the three of us and an elderly woman I recognized vaguely from the mercantile, who Reverend Pratt explained, without my asking, was there only because a wedding needed a witness and his own wife was down with a summer cold.

It was not a long ceremony. I had expected, without quite admitting it to myself, that it would feel like something — grand, or solemn, or at the very least strange enough to mark itself apart from an ordinary Tuesday. Instead it felt mostly like paperwork given a voice. Reverend Pratt read from a worn book in a voice gone flat with repetition, and Calder answered when he was meant to answer, his voice steady, giving nothing away. When it came to me I said what I was meant to say, and found that my own voice sounded strange in my ears, quieter than I meant it, though nobody in that small room seemed to notice.

There was a moment, near the end, when Reverend Pratt asked if there was a ring. Calder’s jaw tightened, just slightly, and I understood in that instant that this was a thing he hadn’t thought to prepare for, in three days of thinking of everything else. He reached into his coat pocket instead and drew out a narrow strip of leather cord, the kind used for tying off a saddlebag, and before I could make sense of what he meant to do with it, he’d looped it once around my finger and tied it there, plain and rough and utterly without ceremony.

“It’s not much,” he said, low, meant only for me. “I’ll get you something proper when I can.”

“It will do,” I told him, and found, to my own surprise, that I meant it. A leather cord tied by a man’s own rough hands felt more honest to me in that moment than gold would have.

Reverend Pratt pronounced us married in the plain language such men use, and that was the whole of it. No music. No gathered well-wishers throwing rice or flowers, the way I remembered, distantly, weddings being marked in the country of my birth, with drums and firecrackers and days of feasting. Just four people in a dusty room, and then it was done, and I was a wife again, for the second time in my life, to a man I had known for scarcely more than a handful of days.

We didn’t linger in town. Calder helped me up into the wagon same as he had that morning, and this time, when his hand closed around mine, I let myself notice it a moment longer than I had before — the calluses along his palm, the careful way he held my weight as though I might break if he wasn’t mindful of it. We rode out past the edge of Dry Creek in a silence that had begun, somewhere in the last two days, to feel less like the absence of words and more like a kind of company in itself.

His homestead was farther out than I’d pictured it. The road narrowed and the land opened up around us, wide and flat and gold with late-summer grass, and I found myself watching it pass with something I couldn’t yet name — not quite dread, not quite anticipation, but some cousin of both. I had spent two years learning the geography of Dry Creek down to its smallest corners, every crack in every boardwalk, every neighbor’s habit and complaint. This land was none of that. It was simply vast, and unfamiliar, and mine now in some way I hadn’t fully reckoned with until I was sitting in the middle of it.

The cabin came into view before I was ready for it — a low, sturdy house of hewn logs with a stone chimney and a porch that sagged gently at one corner, more honest than pretty, the kind of house a man builds with his own hands and his own time rather than paying another man to build it faster. And there, on that porch, stood a small girl.

She had hair the color of dry wheat, escaping its braid in wisps around her face, and she stood very still, the way children stand when they’ve been told to wait and have decided to obey to the letter rather than the spirit of it. A rag doll hung from one hand, worn nearly featureless from years of being loved too hard. She didn’t run to greet the wagon. She didn’t wave. She simply watched us come, with the kind of wariness I recognized because I had worn it myself, once, in the weeks after Tian died, when the whole world had come to feel like something that might take more from me if I let my guard down even for a moment.

Calder brought the wagon to a stop and climbed down first, and I saw something pass over his face as he looked at her — not quite a smile, but the loosening a man’s features do when he’s looking at the one person in the world he’d burn everything down to protect. “Emmie,” he said, and his voice had gone gentler than I’d yet heard it. “Come say hello.”

She came down the porch steps slowly, one at a time, her eyes moving from Calder to me and back again, taking the measure of what had changed while she’d been left behind to wait. Up close she was smaller than I’d guessed from the wagon, seven years old wearing itself like a much older grief, her eyes a pale, watchful blue that held none of a child’s easy curiosity. She stopped a few feet from where I stood and said nothing at all.