Part 1 The first time Captain Daniel Mercer saw Hanna Reitsch, she was not wearing handcuffs. That was the first thing that struck him, though it took him years to...
Part 1 The dust had not settled on Mercy Ridge all morning, as if the town itself knew something was coming and had decided to hold its breath. Men moved...
Part 1 The dust tasted like endings. Etta Prescott had learned the flavor of endings well enough to know them by season. In summer, they tasted of wagon grease and...
Part 1 The auction block smelled like old wood, horse sweat, and shame. Nora Vale stood at the edge of the courthouse yard with her burned hands folded inside her...
Part 1 Trudy Bell heard the shovel before she saw the man. The sound came dull and steady through the afternoon heat, steel biting into creek mud, lifting it, throwing...
Part 1 Abigail Ross stepped down from the stagecoach into the hard white sunlight of Oak Haven, Colorado, and knew before anyone spoke that she had made the worst mistake...
Part 1 Evelyn Grayson learned she had been sold while standing behind the parlor door with mud drying beneath her fingernails. Her father’s voice carried easily through walnut and brass....
Part 1 Mara Caldwell was thrown out of the boardinghouse before dawn with six children, two carpetbags, and a baby tied against her chest beneath a coat that no longer...
Part 1 The little girl fell six feet from Thomas Hale’s door. He heard her before he saw her. Not a knock. Not even the scrape of a hand against...
Part 1 Three hungry children shared one piece of bread in the snow, and Cole Turner knew, before he even crossed the street, that walking away would make him less...