He told her she was finished at the Grand and if she caused a scene, he would involve the sheriff. Rosalie did not cause a scene. She stood there with flower on her apron and a wooden spoon in her hand while 30 people watched. And she did not say a single word because she understood with with a cold and absolute clarity that words were not going to help her. Not here.
Not against a man like Parish who had already decided the story and simply needed Rosalie to play her part in it. So she took off her apron. She laid it on the nearest table. She walked out of the Cheyenne Grand Hotel dining room with her head straight and her jaw set and she did not look back. She cried later in her room with the door locked and her face pressed into her pillow so the woman in the next room wouldn't hear.
She cried until there was nothing left and then she opened her mother's recipe book and held it in her lap and and tried to think. The boarding house had already received a note from Parish suggesting they review their arrangement with Miss Hart. Well, within 3 days, the owner, a thin woman named Mrs. Briggs, who Rosalie had always suspected liked having someone to look down on, informed Rosalie that her room would be needed for another tenant at the end of the week. She had seven days.
7 days to find another position, another room, another rope to grab. She spent five of those days writing letters and knocking on doors and getting the same carefully polite rejections from every kitchen in Cheyenne. Parish's word had gotten there before her. He hadn't needed to say much. A raised eyebrow, a meaningful pause.
That's all it took. On the sixth day, a woman at the employment agency, a stout woman named Mrs. Farwell, who smelled like lavender and looked at Rosalie over her reading spectacles with the particular expression of someone delivering unpleasant news they've rehearsed, told her there were very limited positions available in Cheyenne for a cook without references. However, Mrs. Farwell said.
And here she paused in a way that told Rosalie she was not going to like what came next. There is a placement outside of town. Considerably outside of town. Red Hollow Wyoming. A ranching settlement.
A widowed cattleman named Gideon Rusk was looking for someone to cook and keep house through the winter. Room and board provided modest wages. He had according to Mrs. Farwell's notes already turned down two applicants. What was wrong with them?
Rosalie asked. Mrs. Farwell looked at her over the spectacles again. He didn't say, "These frontier men rarely explain themselves. " Rosalie had heard of Red Hollow, the way you hear of places people say they're from but never go back to. Isolated, cold, the kind of place where winter lasted at 5 months, and the nearest town with a proper store was a day's ride.
She asked how much the wages were. Mrs. Farwell told her it was not much, but it was something, and something was the only thing standing between Rosalie Hartwell and nothing. She took the placement. The wagon ride to Red Hollow took most of a long December day, and by the time the driver dropped her at the gate of Blackthorn Ranch, with her one battered suitcase, and in her mother's recipe book tucked inside her coat, the sun was already dropping toward the horizon, and the cold had moved from uncomfortable to mean.