"I am looking at you."
"Like a man afraid of something."
Gideon's throat moved.
He opened his mouth.
Then closed it.
For a moment, Lydia thought he might lean closer.
Instead, his right hand rose toward his shirt pocket.
Something folded slipped from beneath the coarse brown wool.
An old letter.
Its paper was yellowed, its edges worn.
And across the folded flap lay a dark-red wax seal.
Lydia's breath stopped.
She knew that seal.
Three narrow lines formed the outline of a small iron wheel, crossed by two reeds.
Her first husband had used it on his private correspondence.
She had watched him press that same design into hot wax hundreds of times.
It had appeared on business letters, debt notices, and the envelopes he locked inside his desk.
The last time she saw it, she had been standing in the kitchen of their St. Louis house while he shouted at her for opening a drawer without permission.
Now the seal was in Gideon Hayes's pocket.
In a lonely cabin hundreds of miles from Missouri.
In the middle of a Wyoming blizzard.
Lydia's fingers tightened around the hairbrush.
"Gideon."
He followed her gaze.
His face changed.
She pointed toward the letter.
"Where did you get that?"
Gideon did not answer immediately.
Lydia's voice shook.
"That seal belonged to my husband."
The mountain man looked at her.
"I'm your husband now."
Her eyes filled.
"My first husband."
Gideon slowly removed the letter.
He looked down at the dark wax.
Then back at her.
"Lydia, I didn't know."
"Didn't know what?"
"That you'd recognize it."
She stared.
"Who gave it to you?"
Gideon hesitated.
Then he said something that made the warmth of the cabin seem to disappear.
"My younger brother."
Lydia's hands went cold.
"Where is he?"
Gideon lowered his eyes.
"He died last spring."
Outside, the blizzard struck the window with such force that both mountain dogs lifted their heads.
Lydia stared at the letter.
Then whispered, "My husband has been dead for almost two years."
Gideon looked at the folded paper.
"Then there's something you need to see."
He turned it over.
On the back, written in dark ink, was a date.
May 18, 1886.
Lydia stopped breathing.
Everett Bowman had supposedly died in a warehouse fire in St. Louis four months before that.
And the wax seal was unmistakably his.
For several seconds, the only sound in the cabin came from the stove.
A log shifted inside the firebox.
Orange light flickered across Gideon's face.
Lydia sat motionless, staring at the date.
She remembered the warehouse fire.
February 1886.
The terrible night when a messenger arrived at the small rented house on Market Street and told her there had been an accident.
A storage building belonging to her husband's shipping firm had burned.
Two men were dead.
One had been identified as Everett Bowman.
She had not been permitted to view the body.
The undertaker told her the burns were too severe.
But there had been a gold watch, a signet ring, and papers recovered from the wreckage.
His business partner confirmed the identification.
The authorities accepted it.
And Lydia became a widow at twenty-seven.
She remembered feeling grief.
Not the grief people expected.
Not the terrible longing of a woman who had lost a gentle husband.
Her grief had been tangled with shame, fear, relief, and the dreadful knowledge that part of her was grateful he would never walk through the door again.
Everett had not been a kind man.