Two.
No letter. No word carried by riders through the valley.
By the third week, Evelyn stopped walking to the road to look. She didn’t announce the decision. She didn’t cry. She simply stopped.
Like a river freezing. Not gone. Just still.
She had two children. A failing cabin. Six weeks before the valley locked itself in ice.
And the cruelest part wasn’t abandonment.
It was the law.
The cabin sat on a homestead claim filed by Nathan Hart three years earlier. His name. His claim. Under territorial rules, a married woman had no independent right to that claim. The land belonged to the man who filed the papers. If he left, the claim remained his. If he never returned, the claim could lapse and become open for new filing.
Either way, Evelyn had no standing.
Three years of labor. Three years of planting and mending and hauling water and patching walls and keeping the stove lit through nights so cold the nails in the boards popped like gunshots.
