Eleanor heard what they said about the Cheyenne on her rare trips into town for flour and lamp oil.
“Thieves,” a woman would spit, as though the word itself could ward off hunger.
“They don’t feel pain the way we do,” men claimed with the confidence of those who had never tried to imagine another life from the inside.
Eleanor lowered her head and moved through it all like a shadow. Her grief was a walled garden. She had no room to tend anything else.
She told herself that, anyway.
Then one bright, merciless afternoon, she went into town for kerosene and thread and discovered how thin her walls truly were.
The sun sat overhead like an eye that refused to blink. Dust rose with every hoof and boot. The storefront windows shimmered with heat, and the air tasted like iron and old hay.
A crowd had knotted outside Callahan’s Mercantile, tight with excitement and moral certainty. Eleanor hesitated at the edge, instinct telling her to turn away, to keep moving, to not invite the world into her hands.
But she heard a girl’s voice, not crying, not pleading, just breathing fast through fear.
Eleanor stepped closer.
