Eli held the hen carefully.
“Hope.”
Everyone stopped.
Lena looked at him.
“Hope?”
He nodded.
“Because she came after you stayed.”
Lena felt her throat tighten.
Thomas looked away.
Reid said quietly:
“Hope it is.”
The chicken lived beside the barn for four years and became more violent than any rooster Reid had ever owned.
That was how Lena won her first battle at the ranch.
The second was harder.
Winter.
The pantry.
Money.
Three weeks after the wedding, Lena sat at the kitchen table after everyone slept and opened Reid’s account ledger.
He had not hidden it.
Quite the opposite.
When she asked whether she could look at household expenses, he handed her three years of books and said:
“If you can make sense of them, I’ll worship you.”
She had replied:
“Start with clean socks.”
Now she read.
Prescott Mercantile supplied nearly everything the ranch could not produce.
Flour.
Sugar.
Kerosene.
Coffee.
Tools.
Nails.
Fabric.
Salt.
Medicines.
Prescott also purchased hides and occasionally arranged freight for Reid’s cattle contracts.
The invoices seemed ordinary at first.
Then Lena found a repeated pattern.
A freight charge appearing twice.
Once under supplies.
Again under transport.
Small amounts.
Two dollars.
Three.
Five.
Nothing large enough to cause alarm.
But repeated.
Then she found weights.
One invoice showed twelve sacks of flour billed at fifty pounds each.
Delivery ledger showed eleven sacks received.
Another showed six barrels of kerosene.
Reid’s handwritten notation:
5 arrived, one broken en route.
Yet charge remained for six.
Lena pulled older records.
Same problem.