Prologue

Maine, April 15, 1886

You don’t have to do this, Jacob!” Mama wrung her hands from the doorway to his bedroom, where she hovered a respectful and appropriate distance. Appropriate and distant—amazing how two words could almost sum up a person’s life.

“Someone has to.” He shoved clothes into the satchel, stfuls of hardy work material and not fancy churchgoing stu or business wear. “Why not me?”

“You have a place here! Responsibilities! The business …” Mama ticked o answers to what he’d meant as a rhetorical question.

Women. Jake shook his head and stu ed in a pocketknife and his shaving kit and looked around the room for other essentials. With his pistol holstered at his hip, his favorite boots on his feet, and his saddlebags bulging with enough food to see him through a few days, he didn’t need much else.

Except … He strode over to the bureau, opened his top drawer, and reached until he felt the cool piece of metal he’d thrust back there three months ago. Now he shoved it into his pocket without giving the object a glance.

“Your father needs you to help run the mill,” his mother’s litany continued. “Now more than ever with Edward gone—”

He could tell the instant she recognized her mistake. That she stopped talking was a dead giveaway in and of itself, even if her hand didn’t utter toward her mouth as though to capture the name and stu it back before it could do any damage.

“Yes, Mama.” Jake paused to look her in the eye. “Edward’s gone.” Good to hear you noticed. He swallowed the sarcastic comment but couldn’t bury the bitterness at its root. “Four months since his death, but no one acknowledges it.”

“It doesn’t honor his memory to—”

“Remember him?” Laughter, raw with rage, scraped his throat.

“But it honors him to pretend he itted o to another state, leaving Pa in the lurch? It honors him to let his murderer go free to live a long life?”

“The way he died … Jake, the scandal of it would smear his memory.” She shrugged as though in supplication.

“You mean it would smear the Granger name.” He swung the satchel from his old bed and went to the door. “I have to go, Ma.”

Something in him softened at the misery he saw in her face.

“But …” Tears lled her eyes and began to spill down her cheeks.

It seemed as though the sudden desertion of her only remaining son allowed her to mourn both of them at once, nally crying for the rstborn who’d never come home.

Jake caught his mother in a long hug, not saying he had to go but would come back with Edward’s name clean enough to display on the family tree again.

Jake didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep. And he knew a hug didn’t promise anything, but he hoped it gave his mother some small comfort when she’d nally— nally—shown sorrow for the things that mattered most to her.

“But …” She sni ed, clutching his coat. “What will people say?”

Words. Always words, with his parents. I should have known that’s what mattered. He brushed her hands away. “I. Don’t. Care.”

“What about this family?” She made a nal plea as he slapped his hat on his head. “What about honoring your parents?”

“We have di erent de nitions of honor, Mother.” With that, he headed out the door. West, to begin his hunt.

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