Right around the time rumors started about supply requisitions that never quite added up. Wade had never learned that man's name properly. Men under him just called him Colonel, same as Dobs's customer. Nobody used first names in that outfit, not even amongst themselves. Like the army itself had scrubbed something plain and human out of everybody wearing a uniform.
That had been years before the war ever broke out between the states. Back when soldiering out here meant guarding supply lines and counting rifles more than fighting anybody. The war that followed and the flood of hardened, unemployed soldiers it left behind once it ended was simply what had given a man like Reed the men and the excuse he needed to come back. Could be nothing. Could be a hundred colonels wore that same style of ring.
Silver being silver and crests being common enough currencies among officers who liked reminding people they'd once mattered somewhere. Except it didn't feel like nothing. It felt riding home through that heat with Wolfrunner silent beside him. Like a door he hadn't known was still standing had just creaked open a crack, letting in exactly the kind of light Wade wasn't sure he was ready to see by. That night, back at the cabin, Wade told Autumn Sky everything.
The bootprints he'd buried five years ago under an easier story. The fragment Dobs. The colonel who'd been circling this territory for five long years, asking about water, paying cash, never leaving a name behind him worth chasing. The ring, the itch of a memory he couldn't quite pin flat enough to look at directly. She listened without interrupting, her face unreadable in the lamplight until he finally ran out of words.
"Tell me about her," Autumn Sky said. "Your wife, you've said her name maybe twice since I've known you. never anything more than that. Wade wasn't sure at first that he could. Five years of keeping a door shut that tight, and now somebody was simply asking him to open it gentle, no pushing at all. And somehow that made it harder, not easier.
Sarah, he said finally, she hummed when she worked off key every time and knew it and didn't care one bit. Used to say, a song didn't need to be pretty to be worth singing. He stopped, started again. We had 8 months together before it happened. Wasn't near enough time.
Don't reckon any amount would have been if I'm honest. What happened to her wasn't your fault. Feels like it was. I rode out that morning to check a fence line. Left her alone. three hours is all it took. three hours and I came home to smoke and a shawl caught on a post and nothing else left of the life I thought I was building.