The first time my husband heard a little girl's voice coming from behind our kitchen stove, he reached for his rifle.
The second time he heard it, he went completely pale.
And when that frightened child whispered, "Please don't open the door. He's still here," I realized that the chicken disappearing from our Sunday dinner was only the beginning of something far more dangerous.
But what frightened me most wasn't the child hiding inside our supposedly locked cabin.
It was the expression on my husband's face.
Because the moment he heard that little voice, he recognized it.
And he knew exactly who the child was.
My name is Rose.
I was twenty-nine years old that winter, weighed almost three hundred pounds, and lived with my husband, William, in a remote log cabin deep in the Appalachian Mountains.
At least, that's where I believed our marriage had brought me.
A peaceful cabin.
A loving husband.
A small piece of land surrounded by towering pines, icy mountain streams, and valleys so quiet that the wind sometimes sounded like someone whispering through the trees.
I had married William eight months earlier.
He was thirty-eight, exceptionally tall, broad-shouldered, and powerful enough to carry an entire barrel of flour from the wagon without asking anyone for help.
His dark-brown hair fell almost to his shoulders, and his thick beard made him look far more intimidating than he actually was.
Most days, he wore a heavy fur vest over his bare chest, rugged leather trousers, and boots that had survived more mountain winters than I cared to imagine.
People in the nearby settlement called him the Mountain Wolf.
They said he could track a deer through falling snow.
They said he once carried an injured horse out of a frozen creek.
They said he had fought off three armed cattle thieves with nothing but an axe handle.
I didn't know whether all those stories were true.
But I knew one thing.
The man who frightened half the mountain territory had never once made me feel ashamed of my body.
Before I married him, I had spent years listening to relatives describe me as too large, too heavy, too awkward, and too difficult to love.
Women whispered about my broad hips and thick arms.
Men laughed at the amount of fabric required to make my dresses.
My own aunt once told me that any man willing to marry a woman my size must either be blind or desperate.
William heard her say that on the morning of our wedding.
He didn't shout.
He didn't threaten her.