I Need a Wife by Tomorrow
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8
LilLi
Our peace held for the better part of two weeks, long enough that I had almost let myself believe Rourke’s visit to the fence line had been the whole of his reach, a threat spent rather than a threat merely postponed. I should have known better. Men like Rourke did not ride away satisfied simply because they’d been told to leave. They rode away to gather what they needed to come back stronger, and I understood that clearly enough the afternoon he returned, because this time he did not come alone.
Those two weeks had been good ones. The adoption papers Judge Hawkins had begun for us sat in the tin box on the mantel, waiting on whatever further signatures and delays the territorial courts required, but Emmie had taken to calling me something other than my name a handful of times now, quiet and testing, as though she were trying the word for size before committing herself fully to it. Calder had grown easier around me too, quicker to touch my shoulder in passing, quicker to catch my eye across a room and let something private pass between us without either of us needing to speak it aloud. I had let myself believe, in those two good weeks, that whatever trouble Rourke meant to bring us had cooled, or lost its nerve, or found some easier target elsewhere in the county to trouble instead.
I was hanging wash when I heard the horses, three sets this time instead of one, and I felt my stomach drop before I’d even turned to look, some old instinct recognizing trouble in the rhythm of hooves before my mind had caught up to name it. Rourke rode in front, same as before, but behind him came two other men I didn’t recognize, rough-looking sorts with the kind of hard, hungry faces that told me plainly enough what manner of work they were accustomed to being paid for. All three carried rifles, slung loose and visible rather than hidden, a message in itself, and their horses came in careless across the edge of my garden, trampling a row of cornstalks I’d spent the better part of a month coaxing up out of the dry soil.
Emmie was helping me with the wash, and I felt her small hands find the fabric of my skirt and grip it tight the moment she saw them, scurrying half behind me the way she still did when the world turned suddenly frightening. Calder came out of the barn at the sound of the horses, a pitchfork still in his hand from whatever chore he’d been at, and I watched his whole body go rigid with a fury I hadn’t seen in him since the day Rourke first mentioned Silas, though he stopped himself ten feet short of the yard, holding whatever violence was in him carefully in check.
“I told you to leave us be, Rourke,” he said, his voice pitched low and dangerously even.
“We’re here to collect a debt.” Rourke didn’t dismount, same as always, and this time he spat a stream of tobacco juice near enough to my feet that I understood it for the deliberate insult it was meant to be. “This land belonged to your brother, by rights. Ought to be sold, the money put in trust for the orphan, proper and legal. We’re here on behalf of the town’s concerned citizens, to see justice done for the girl.”
It was a lie dressed up thin enough that even Rourke seemed to know it wouldn’t hold under close inspection, but I understood, watching the two men flanking him shift their rifles a little more visibly into view, that the lie wasn’t really the point of the visit. The rifles were the point. The lie was only the excuse they’d give themselves afterward, if anyone ever asked what business three armed men had riding onto a homesteader’s land uninvited.
I saw the war playing out plain across Calder’s face — the same instinct I imagined had kept him alive through whatever violence his reputation was built on, the instinct to put himself between danger and the people he loved, to send us running for the house while he faced this alone, the way I suspected he had faced most every hard thing in his life before I ever arrived to share the weight of it with him. I saw him glance toward me and Emmie, a flicker of raw panic breaking through the careful stillness he was fighting to hold, and I understood, in that single glance, that he meant to tell us to run.
I did not give him the chance.
I stepped forward before he could speak, my heart hammering hard enough that I could feel it in my throat, Emmie’s grip tightening on my skirt as I moved but her feet coming with me rather than holding me back. I did not falter, though every instinct in me wanted to. I met Rourke’s gaze straight on, the way I had learned, in two years of running a store alone in a county that hadn’t always been kind to a widow who looked and spoke as I did, to meet the gaze of any man who thought his size or his standing entitled him to more deference than I was inclined to give.
“This is our home,” I said, and I made certain my voice carried clean across the yard, steady, with none of the tremor I felt in my hands. “We are not leaving.”
Calder’s eyes found mine, something in his face shifting from raw fear into something closer to disbelief, and I understood he had braced himself to protect a woman who needed shielding, and had not braced himself at all for a woman who meant to stand directly in the path of the danger alongside him. I did not look back at him to see the rest of what crossed his face. I kept my eyes on Rourke, because I understood that whatever ground I gave up in that moment, even by so much as a glance away, was ground I would not easily win back.
“You are not concerned citizens,” I told him, my voice cutting clean through whatever bluster he’d been readying to answer me with. “You are thieves who’ve dressed yourselves up in a child’s name because it’s easier to steal from a family than to admit what you actually want is the land beneath their feet. There is no justice in what you’re proposing, Mr. Rourke. There is only greed, wearing a better coat than it deserves. Leave now, and don’t trouble this family again.”
He tried once more to find his footing, some remnant of his usual easy contempt surfacing in his face. “Careful how you speak to me, ma’am. A woman in your position—”
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