The oldest boy did not even wait for Clara Whitmore to set down her suitcase.
“Don’t unpack.”
The words came flat and hard across the windblown platform of Red Creek Station.
Clara stopped with one hand still wrapped around the cracked leather handle.
Behind her, the locomotive released a violent breath of white steam that rolled across the wooden boards and briefly swallowed the lower half of her dusty blue-gray dress. Somewhere farther down the train, a porter shouted for the last passengers to clear the baggage car. Horses stamped beside a hitching rail. A baby cried. A woman laughed as she embraced a man she had apparently been waiting months to see.
Yet Clara heard only the boy.
He was perhaps fourteen.
Dark-haired.
Thin.
Old enough to have learned how to make hurt resemble anger.
His arms were crossed tightly against his chest, and he stood half a step in front of the four younger children as if protecting them from her.
Clara looked at him.
Then at the man behind him.
Nathan Cole.
The stranger she had crossed hundreds of miles to marry.
He was not old.
That surprised her first.
Thirty-five, perhaps.
Thirty-six at most.
Tall enough that the roofline of the station made him look even broader than he was, though there was something lean about him that suggested months of poor sleep and hurried meals. Thick brown hair curled beneath a weathered hat. Dark stubble shadowed his jaw. His coat had been repaired twice at one cuff and once beneath the right arm.
His eyes were the part Clara could not ignore.
Blue-gray.
Tired.
Not cruel.
She had spent the entire train journey preparing herself for cruelty because cruelty was easier to imagine than grief.
But Nathan Cole looked like a man who had once been struck by something enormous and had simply never stopped bracing for the next blow.
The fourteen-year-old boy stepped forward again.
“The others said they’d stay too.”
Nathan’s jaw tightened.
“Ethan.”
The boy did not look at his father.
He kept his eyes on Clara.
“One stayed six days.”
A younger boy beside him muttered, “Five.”
“Six.”
“She left before breakfast on the sixth.”
“That still counts.”
The two girls standing behind them tightened their grip on each other’s hands.
The smallest boy—perhaps five—hid nearly entirely behind Nathan’s coat.
Clara swallowed.
Others.