The train had been moving west for three days when Clara Whitmore finally stopped pretending she wasn't afraid.

She sat alone beside the window, her hands folded over a small leather suitcase. Inside were two dresses, a worn Bible that had belonged to her mother, a sewing kit, a photograph of her late father, and the only letter she had received from the man she was traveling to marry.

Samuel Hayes.

She had never seen his face.

She knew only what the letter had told her.

He was thirty-nine years old. He owned a ranch outside a small frontier settlement called Mercy Ridge. He had six sons. His wife had died two years earlier. The ranch was struggling. He needed someone to manage the house and help care for the boys.

There had been no promises of romance.

No description of blue eyes or broad shoulders.

No poetic declaration about love at first sight.

The letter had been brutally practical.

I need a wife. You need a home. I will treat you honestly if you do the same.

Clara had read those words more than fifty times.

Perhaps that was why she had agreed.

At twenty-seven, she had already learned that life did not always offer people beautiful choices.

Sometimes it offered only choices that hurt less than the alternatives.

Her father had died during the previous winter. His small farm had been swallowed by debt. Her younger sister had married and moved east. Clara had remained behind, trying to keep the property alive, but the drought had destroyed the wheat, and the bank had taken the land.

She had worked as a seamstress afterward.

For almost a year she survived by repairing dresses, coats, curtains, and work clothes. But winter came early, and customers stopped paying regularly. Then the boardinghouse where she lived raised its prices.

She had spent her last savings on coal.

Three weeks later, a traveling preacher mentioned that a rancher in Colorado was looking for a wife.

Clara had laughed when she first heard it.

Then she had asked for the man's name.

Now she was traveling toward him.

Outside the window, the world had changed.

The familiar green fields of the East had disappeared. In their place were endless stretches of brown grass, distant mountains, dry riverbeds, and enormous skies.

Clara pressed her forehead against the cold glass.

"What have you gotten yourself into?"

The question was barely louder than a whisper.

The woman sitting across the aisle glanced at her.

"You'll find out soon enough."

Clara turned.

The woman was perhaps fifty, dressed in a dark traveling coat and wearing a silver brooch at her throat.

"Excuse me?"

"You are going to Mercy Ridge, aren't you?"

Clara hesitated.

"Yes."

"Hayes ranch?"

Clara nodded.

The woman's expression changed.

"You should know what you're walking into."

Clara waited.

"Six boys."

"I know."

"Not six polite little children."

"I assumed they weren't."

The woman gave a dry laugh.

"The oldest is eighteen. The youngest is four. Between them, they've managed to frighten away three housekeepers and one schoolteacher."

Clara looked back toward the window.

"Then perhaps I'm the fool they need."

The woman studied her.

"Why would you marry a man you've never met?"

Clara's fingers tightened around the handle of her suitcase.

"Because sometimes a stranger is safer than having nowhere to go."

The woman said nothing after that.

Clara appreciated it.

She had no desire to explain her poverty to strangers.

The train arrived at Mercy Ridge just before sunset.

It was not a town so much as a collection of buildings stubbornly refusing to disappear.

There was a general store, a blacksmith, a church, a saloon, a stable, a boardinghouse, and perhaps twenty houses scattered along the dusty road.