Neither Nathan nor Elena could see the whole path ahead. They only knew that turning back would leave too many questions unanswered.
On a late-October afternoon, the town of Red Hollow lay beneath the pale gold light of autumn. The train from the east crawled into the station so slowly that Nathan Cole could hear the iron wheels grinding against the rails. He stood alone beside an old wagon, one hand resting on the brim of his hat, watching each passenger step down.
He had not come to the station expecting romance.
He had come because his ranch was dying.
Three months earlier, Nathan had sent a short letter to a marriage agency in St. Louis. He wrote that he needed a wife who knew how to work, was not afraid of a hard life, and understood that a ranch in Colorado was nothing like a house with a warm fireplace in the city. He promised no love. He promised no wealth.
He promised only the truth.
The last woman to step from the train wore a dark-blue dress faded at the hem. She carried a small suitcase and an old wooden box. She looked around the platform, then directly at Nathan.
"Are you Nathan Cole?"
"Yes."
"Elena Reyes."
Nathan nodded. "I assume you received my letter."
"I did."
She did not smile. Neither did he.
Yet something in Elena's eyes caught his attention. They were not the eyes of a woman who had merely arrived in a strange place. They looked like the eyes of someone who had been searching for a particular place for a very long time and had finally found it.
Nathan took her suitcase.
"The ride to the ranch takes nearly two hours."
"All right."
"There aren't many comforts there."
"I didn't come for comfort."
The answer made Nathan look at her a second time.
As they walked toward the wagon, Elena suddenly stopped.
"There is something I have to ask."
Nathan turned.
"Do you know a man named Samuel Reyes?"
The name fell between them like a stone.
Nathan did not answer immediately.
Samuel Reyes.
He had heard that name seventeen years earlier, in a story his father had always refused to discuss.
"Why do you ask?"
Elena stared at him for a long moment.
"Because that was my father."
Nathan felt the suitcase grow heavier in his hand.
He did not yet know that the woman he had just come to collect would reopen a door the entire Cole family had spent seventeen years trying to keep shut.