Puit," the man said the name like it explained everything. "She turns away anybody who might bring trouble to her doorstep. Doesn't matter if the trouble's hers or not. "I'm not trouble." "Didn't say you were that either."" He stood, offered a hand down to her.
Eleanor stared at it a long moment before she took it because taking a stranger's hand felt like admitting she had nothing left to refuse with. "Name's Nathaniel Carter. These are my children, Clara and Henry." The girl Clara didn't move. She studied Eleanor the way a bank teller studies a counterfeit bill, looking for the one detail that would prove her right about something.
The boy, small and pale beneath a coat two sizes too big, peered out from behind his father's leg, like Eleanor might vanish if he blinked. "Eleanor Whitmore," she said. Her voice cracked on her own name because for 3 weeks now, it hadn't felt like it belonged to her. "Witmore." Nathaniel repeated it slow like he was turning it over, checking it for weight.
"You're not from around here, Boston." She wrapped her arms tighter around herself. The suitcase beside her held everything she owned in the world, and it wasn't much. A few dresses, a hairbrush with her mother's initials on the handle. A photograph of a husband who'd been dead 3 weeks and whose family had made it clear in no uncertain terms that she had died along with him as far as they were concerned.
"My husband passed. Fever took him sudden middle of November." His family said she stopped, started again. His family said I'd failed to give them what they wanted. And now that he was gone, I wasn't their concern anymore.
They gave me train fare West and told me a widow ought to learn to make her own way. She hadn't meant to say all that. She hadn't meant to say any of it to a stranger crouched in the mud in front of his own children. But something about the cold and the 11 minutes of sitting alone, and the way this man's eyes didn't flinch away from her, the way everyone else's had loosened something in her chest that she'd kept locked tight since Boston. Nathaniel didn't say he was sorry.
He didn't offer pity, which Eleanor had come to recognize as its own kind of insult. He only nodded like he'd heard worse, like the world had shown him plenty of cruelty, and this was simply one more entry in a long ledger. "Cedar Hollow's not an easy place for a woman alone," he said. "Winter here will kill you faster than any sickness. You got people coming for you, family, somewhere."
"No." The word came out flat. "Final, there's no one." The wind picked up. Henry pressed himself further into his father's coat and Clara's jaw tightened, though whether from cold or something else Eleanor couldn't tell.
"I run a cattle ranch a few miles out," Nathaniel said. "Was in town for supplies before the roads froze over complete? I could use hired help around the house. Cooking, cleaning, mending. I'd pay a fair wage and you'd have a roof."