The room tilted.
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No.”
“She sent me a letter three days before she died.”
“You’re lying.”
Harlan stepped closer.
Josephine backed away.
“I still have it.”
“My father said the wheel broke.”
“The wheel had been cut.”
“You weren’t there.”
“I found the carriage.”
Josephine stopped breathing.
The pounding outside vanished.
Everything vanished except Harlan’s face.
“You found her?”
“Yes.”
“Alive?”
Harlan looked down.
Josephine understood.
A sound escaped her throat.
Not quite a sob.
Harlan moved instinctively toward her.
She raised both hands.
“Don’t.”
He stopped.
Immediately.
Josephine pressed one palm over her mouth.
Her mother had been gone eight months.
Eight months of grief.
Eight months of accepting an accident.
Eight months of remembering the last morning they spent together.
Her mother had sewn something at the kitchen table.
White cloth across her lap.
A needle flashing in morning light.
Josephine had asked what she was repairing.
“An old promise,” Miriam had said.
Josephine looked toward the dress.
“No.”
The memory returned more clearly.
White cloth.
Ivory.
This dress.
Her mother had been sewing this dress.
Pike shouted from outside.
“Time’s over!”
A gunshot exploded.
The window shattered.
Harlan moved before Josephine screamed.
He threw himself between her and the glass.
Fragments struck his fur vest.
He pushed her behind the stone fireplace.
“Stay down.”
Another shot hit the door.
Harlan fired once through the broken window.
A horse screamed outside.
Men cursed.
Josephine crouched beside the hearth, gripping the robe around herself.
Harlan reloaded.
“What do we do?”
“We leave.”
“Through that?”
“Other way.”
He pulled aside a shelf.
Behind it was a narrow wooden door Josephine had not noticed.
He opened it.
Blackness waited beyond.
“A storage tunnel.”
“You have a tunnel?”
“Old mining cabin.”
Harlan grabbed a lantern and lit it.
He took the drying wedding dress from the rack.
Josephine stared.
“You’re taking that?”
“That’s what they came for.”
“Then leave it.”
“If we leave it, your mother died for nothing.”
The words cut through her panic.
Harlan shoved the dress into a canvas sack.
He grabbed a coat from a peg and handed it to her.
Josephine pulled it over the dry wool shift.
The coat belonged to him.
It swallowed her.
Harlan fastened his gun belt.
Then he looked at Josephine.
“You decide.”
She blinked.
“What?”
“The tunnel comes out above the creek. We can head east toward Silver Junction.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I keep you alive here as long as I can.”
“You would let me stay?”
“You’re not my prisoner.”
Shots struck the cabin again.
Harlan waited.
Even now.
He actually waited for her answer.