“Open your dead wife’s room.”
The rancher’s face turned to stone.
Ruth’s mother, Eleanor Henson, had been at the Hale ranch less than an hour when she made the request. She stood by the wide oak dining table, her traveling cloak still damp around the hem from the morning’s light snow, her eyes fixed on the man who sat at the head of the board.
Jacob Hale slowly set down his mug of coffee. The dark liquid sloshed slightly against the tin, but his big, calloused hands remained steady.
“That room stays closed,” he said. His voice was low, flat, and carried the heavy weight of a man used to giving orders that went unquestioned across five thousand acres of Wyoming range.
Across the table, Ruth said nothing. She kept her hands folded neatly in her lap, her gray eyes moving between her mother’s sharp features and the rigid profile of her husband. Beside her, Jacob’s seven-year-old twin boys, Cal and Denny, sat as still as stone fence posts.
Everyone in the house knew the door at the end of the upstairs hallway. It was painted a dark pine green, its brass handle polished from habit rather than use, its keyhole dark and empty. Nobody opened it. Nobody touched the latch. Not since Miriam died three years earlier.
Inside that room, time had been frozen under a skin of dust. Her everyday dresses were still hung in the cedar wardrobe. Her books rested on the small side table by the window. Her wicker sewing basket sat beside the rocking chair, a length of white lace still attached to a rusted needle. Even the small blue woolen shawl she had worn the winter before the fever took her remained draped over the foot of the bed, right where she had dropped it before taking to her sickbed.
Jacob had locked the door himself the morning after the funeral, turned the heavy iron key, and dropped it into his waistcoat pocket. And he had never unlocked it again.
Eleanor looked directly at him, unimpressed by his size or his silence. “If you’re going to ask my daughter to build a life in this house, Jacob, she cannot spend that life living beside a shrine to the woman who came before her.”
Jacob stood up. He did not raise his voice, but the wooden chair groaned as it pushed back against the floorboards.
“I said no.”
He turned on his heel, grabbed his sheepskin coat from the peg beside the door, and walked out into the biting winter wind.
The day dragged on in stiff, awkward silence. Jacob stayed out in the timber pastures until dark, checking stock tanks that didn't need checking and mending wire that was already tight. When he returned, the house was dark save for the kitchen lamp. Ruth had left a plate of salt pork and beans warm on the hearth, but she had already retired to the guest room downstairs.
Jacob ate alone in the quiet house, the ticking of the shelf clock sounding like iron striking stone.
It was long past midnight when a faint scrape dragged Jacob out of a thin, uneasy sleep. He sat up in his bed, his hand reaching instinctively for his trousers. He pulled them on, stepped out into the dark hallway, and stopped.
A thin line of yellow moonlight cut through the window at the end of the corridor. Sitting on the cold floorboards directly outside the locked green door was Denny. He was dressed in his flannel nightshirt, his small knees pulled up to his chest. Beside him sat Cal, staring at the floor with wide, dark eyes.
Denny was holding something small and heavy in both hands. The metal glinted in the moonlight.
It was the brass key Jacob kept locked in the small iron box inside his desk drawer—the key he hadn't touched in thirty-six months.
Jacob walked down the hall, his bare feet silent on the pine floor. He knelt beside his sons.
“Denny,” Jacob whispered. “Where did you get that?”
Denny didn't look up. His small fingers tightened around the cool metal. “Out of the desk.”
“Why?”
Cal wiped his nose with his sleeve, a faint, ragged sob escaping his throat. “We want Ruth to have the room.”
Jacob felt as though the floor beneath him had dropped away into the dark. “That was your mother’s room, Cal.”
“We know,” Cal whispered, staring at his bare toes. “But Mama isn't coming back.”