The sky splits open. The sky cracked open like a broken promise. And Cara Holloway drove straight into its fury. She had no destination. That was the point.
The day before Thanksgiving marked exactly one year since she had buried her husband and the daughter she never got to hold. One year since the hemorrhage took everything. Staying home meant drowning in silence and sympathy casserles from neighbors who meant well but couldn't possibly understand. So she drove west, then north, then wherever the road bent. Wyoming's emptiness suited her emptiness.
The snow started gentle, almost pretty. Within an hour, it turned vicious. Wind slammed her wagon sideways. Visibility collapsed to nothing. Carara's hands achd from gripping the rains and her mayor stumbled twice on ice hidden beneath white powder.
She should have stopped in the last town. Should have taken a room. Should have done a lot of things differently over the past year. Through the curtain of snow, a light appeared, faint, golden, flickering. A farmhouse, isolated and sturdy, with smoke curling from the chimney.
The lamp in the window burned like a small sun against the gray apocalypse of the storm. Cara turned toward it without hesitation. She tied her mare under the barn's overhang, hands trembling from cold, stumbled to the porch, knocked, waited. The door opened, and exhaustion stared back at her. The man was perhaps 30.
Perhaps older weariness made age difficult to read. Unshaven, dark-circled eyes, shirt sleeves rolled despite the cold. Behind him, a baby's cry pierced the air, sharp and relentless and desperate in the way only infants can manage. He looked at her snowcrusted coat, her chattering jaw, her horse visible through the white chaos behind her. "Roads are already gone," he said.
His voice was flat, hollowed out. You'd best come in. Cara stepped inside. The warmth hit her like a physical blow and she swayed. The man she didn't even know his name caught her elbow, steadied her, then released her immediately.
The baby screamed louder. The house was clean enough, but cluttered with evidence of survival rather than living. Dishes in the sink. A basket of laundry half-folded. Abandoned.
A rocking chair near the fire worn smooth by use. I'm Jonathan Mercer," he said, already moving toward the crying. There's coffee on the stove. "Help yourself. " Cara watched him disappear into the back room. The crying continued, joined now by his low murmuring, words she couldn't make out, soothing sounds that weren't soothing anything.
She poured coffee with shaking hands. Drank it black and scalding, let it burn away the cold. The crying went on and on. Something deep in Carara's chest cracked open. A fissure she had spent 12 months sealing shut.
Her body remembered things her mind had tried to forget the weight of an infant. The particular rhythm that calmed them. The songs that worked when nothing else would. She set down the cup and followed the sound. Jonathan stood in the doorway of a small bedroom holding a bundle wrapped in faded blue wool.
His movements were mechanical, bouncing, padding, the same motions repeated without conviction. He looked up when Cara appeared, too tired even for surprise at this stranger invading his homes in her rooms. "She won't settle," he said. Defeat saturated every syllable. "6 months of this.
She never settles. " Carara's arms opened without her permission. "May I? " Jonathan stared at her, at this woman he'd known for 3 minutes, at her snow dampened hair and hollow cheeks and eyes that held something he recognized but couldn't name. He handed her the baby, what silence sounds like. The infant weighed almost nothing. Seven, maybe 8 lb of fury and need and tiny clenched fists.