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  Tears filled Cadence’s eyes and she blinked them away. How was it possible to feel so much pain and happiness simultaneously?

  “We were married about nine years ago,” Beau explained. “In Cincinnati. I was twenty-five and Abigail was twenty.”

  Cadence nodded, encouraging him to go on. They were still holding hands and she liked the idea of him keeping her close by way of touch.

  “My parents had a shop in town, but I never liked living there. I wanted to be out in the countryside, free. So, I started working on farms and ranches as soon as someone would hire my scrawny little self.”

  Cadence laughed at the idea of Beau ever having been scrawny. It was quite hard to imagine.

  “So, after I’d saved enough money, I made plans to move out west. To Wyoming Territory. That had always been my dream and Abigail fit right into it. She wanted to live somewhere far away from a city as well, even though her parents hated to see her go...” A reflective look came across Beau’s face. “They didn’t like me much at all.”

  “They were silly.” Cadence squeezed his hand. Her parents would surely have loved Beau.

  Beau tucked his chin, becoming more somber. “So, we packed up a wagon and left Cincinnati. About six years ago. We were planning on settling somewhere in the West part of Wyoming Territory, though we weren’t tied to that idea. We were also open to go farther West. It just depended on where the road took us.”

  Cadence’s heart rate increased. She knew they were coming to a dramatic turn in the story, and she almost could not bear the anxiety that came with waiting.

  “Abigail got sick on the road,” Beau quietly said. His eyes were on Cadence’s face, but they were glazed over. He wasn’t there. “Her fever went up real quick. I don’t even know how high it got. I pushed the horses quick, trying to get us to the next town, but she died before we made it.”

  Shiver after shiver ran down Cadence’s back and across her arms. Somehow, she was still breathing. Her lungs were the only things working, though. Her mind was locked, her heart in total shock. She knew Abigail had died, of course, but hearing the exact story made it real in a shocking way.

  With her free hand, she wiped away the tear escaping from her eye. “Beau, that is… that is difficult. I am sorry that happened to you.”

  He squeezed her hand back. “Thank you.”

  Though Cadence believed much of what happened was God’s will, she couldn’t bring herself to say that to Beau. It was his loss they were speaking of. Though she was certain God had taken her parents from her because it was their time, it was not her responsibility to claim the same thing had happened to Abigail.

  “Thank you for sharing your story with me,” she earnestly said.

  “I’ve never told that to anyone.”

  “I am honored.”

  Sniffling, Cadence stood. “You are a strong, gentle, amazing man, Beau Johnson.”

  Beau’s eyes were locked on her face as he also stood. “I’m just lucky that you haven’t left yet… You aren’t still leaving me, are you?”

  “No,” she half-cried, half sang. “I do not want to.”

  “Good.” Grinning, he offered Cadence his arm. “Let me do my duty, please, and escort my fiancée home.”

  “I would like that very much.”

  Accepting his arm, they made their way to the door, Cadence’s heart full to the brim. There was joy there. Pain. Optimism. Anger. Everything the human heart could hold, Cadence’s did.

  But what really stood out as Beau took her outside and helped her into Pip’s saddle was courage. Beau had bared his soul and told her his tragic story. It was time she did the same.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  22. Beau

  Chapter twenty-two

  Beau Johnson was a happy man. The whole ride home to Winding Path, his heart sang.

  “Where did you put the ring? You didn’t toss it in the river, did you?” he joked, half-afraid Cadence might have done just that.

  “Of course not,” she smiled. “Nothing you could ever do would cause me to get rid of a piece of beautiful jewelry.”

  “Good to know,” he chuckled.

  In the ranch’s yard, he reached over for Pip’s reins. “You go on in the house. I’ll put the horses up.”

  Cadence hesitated. “I would like to come with you.”

  “It’s cold. Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  At the stable, Beau hurried off Stetson to help Cadence to the ground. As his hands clasped around her waist and he lowered her down, their eyes met and his breath caught in his throat. He had been so afraid he’d lost her. Now that he had spilled the truth and she’d forgiven him, he was never going to let her go again.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “You’re welcome.” He tipped his hat, just to be funny. “Miss.”

  Cadence turned her face down as she smiled. She was showing no signs of wanting to go to the house.

  “Go on,” Beau urged, taking both reins and walking for the stalls. “I’ll be quick with the horses.”

  “No, Beau, I—there is something I would like to tell you.”

  Beau stopped and turned back around. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong,” she quickly answered. “I was just thinking… You shared the story of your past with me and now, I would like to do the same.” Her shining, uncertain eyes set on his. “That is, if you would like to hear it.”

  A wave of peace and happiness washed over Beau. This really was a turning point. They were opening up, sharing everything with each other. Things were going to be good after all.

  “Of course, I want to hear it. Just let me put these two away.”

  He worked fast, getting them into the stable while Cadence sat on an overturned barrel.

  “Don’t you want to go inside?” he asked as he closed Stetson’s stall.

  “I, um, no. I fear that if I have more time to think about this, I will change my mind.”

  Beau noticed how pale she was. Fear striking, he went quickly to the barrel and squatted next to her. “Cadence?”

  She weakly smiled. “I am fine, Beau. I just need to get this out. Like your own story, I am afraid it is a rather sad one.”

  “Is this about your parents?”

  She nodded.

  “All right,” he soothingly said. “I’m listening.” Hauling over a second barrel, he righted it and took a seat next to Cadence. She gave him the same half-hearted smiled she had before.

  “My story is somewhat similar to yours,” she said in a small voice that only half-filled the stable. “I was born in Baltimore, as you know. My father was a tailor. He loved his job and was very proud of the shop. And he did well when I was very young. But as I became older, the city grew. More tailors brought their business to the area. There was too much competition. My parents decided we would move to California, to a place where there was a greater demand for my father’s trade.”

  She paused, swallowing hard.

  “How old were you?” Beau asked.

  “Nineteen. This was… also about six years ago.”

  Beau nodded. Cadence was shivering, either from the cold or the memories running through her head. Beau jumped up from the barrel and fetched the cleanest horse blanket he could find. She gave him an appreciative look as he draped it over her shoulders.

  “I was very excited,” she continued as Beau resumed his seat. “And afraid, yes, but everything about California sounded so thrilling.” She looked down at her lap, where her hands were cinched together.

  “It is so strange, really,” Cadence said in a voice so hollow, it sent a shiver through Beau. “The accident happened so close to here… not thirty miles away.”

  “Thirty miles?” Beau wanted to ask a second time. A third. Thirty miles couldn’t be right.

  “Yes.” Her sad eyes met his. “An oddity, is it not? That, six years later, simply by chance, I should find myself traveling west once
more and settling so close to where my parents died.”

  Beau tried to swallow the lump in his throat, but it was a stubborn one. “What happened?”

  “We were crossing the river there. It was almost night time and the water was so fast. It had been raining all day. More of a sprinkle than anything else, but it must have rained more at the river. I guess that’s why it was so fast. It knocked the wagon right over, taking the horses with it. But my father, he was so strong and quick… He unhitched the horses and they swam away.”

  “And your wagon?”

  She shook her head. “It went right down the river, hitting some rocks and getting broken apart. The boxes and bedding… it was everywhere.”

  Beau could see it as if it were happening right in front of his two eyes. Everything a family owned in the world, being carted away by a force beyond their control. He would have comforted Cadence then if he was not sure of what was to come next.

  “We couldn’t get anything,” she said. “We barely made it out of the river. And then, we had to go and get the horses. It was summer, but the sun was setting fast. We got them, then went back close to the road. My father had this idea to light a fire, thinking perhaps someone might see it glowing, or maybe even see the smoke before the sun set, and come to help us. So, we did that, but then, the horses spooked all of a sudden. I can’t remember why. But they got away once more.”

  Cadence scrunched her face, looking as if she were trying hard to recall what happened next.

  “My parents ran down the river bank, going after the horses. Because they were so spooked, they just kept running and running, you see. I ran after them, too. I was just a little bit behind...”

  So, she didn’t have the limp yet. Not if she was able to run just as fast as anyone else.

  Beau could barely breathe. He didn’t want to hear the rest of this story, but he needed to.

  “The bank went up, rose to this really tall hill. It almost felt like the start of a mountain, it was so tall. I kept slipping in the mud, there was so much of it. And there were rocks everywhere, big ones.”

  Cadence was looking at the other end of the barn, her eyes unfocused. “It just happened. All of a sudden. The ground gave under my feet. I tried to grab hold onto something, but there was nothing there. Everything was moving. The whole world was shifting. I heard my mother shout, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Rocks were bumping into each other, bushes going past me. I tumbled down and over my head and landed up right next to the river.” Her eyes met Beau’s, but they were still so distant. “That’s when I realized I couldn’t move. My leg was right between two big rocks, all pinned down. No matter how much I pushed and pulled, it was no use.”

  Fire raged in Beau’s chest. He wanted to yell, to fall to his knees and curse this wicked, cruel world. But at the same time, he was paralyzed with shock, unable to do anything but listen to Cadence go on.

  “I kept calling to my parents.” Cadence’s voice cracked, but her face was still stoic. Or broken. Perhaps that’s what Beau was seeing there: the destruction of her soul.

  “But they never answered,” she said. “I called and called, till my voice was hoarse and I could barely speak. The sun set… and I was all alone.”

  A shiver went all the way into Beau’s toes. “How long were you there for?”

  Cadence blinked. “Till the next morning. I heard some ranchers nearby and called out to them. They came and pushed the rocks off of me.”

  “Is that why...” Beau couldn’t bring himself to finish a question he already knew the answer to. Not only had Cadence lost her parents and had her leg maimed in one night, she had also then gained her debilitating fear of the dark.

  Cadence didn’t say anything. Lowering his face, Beau rubbed it hard, praying he would wake up from this nightmare. But just like that fateful day Abigail had been taken from him, just like that day Cadence’s parents had died, this was no dream.

  “They took me to Hudson,” Cadence explained in the same monotonous voice. “And I was there for weeks before the doctor said I was good enough to travel. The sheriff there bought me a train ticket and I went back home.”

  Beau had to ask something—anything—to keep himself from digging his nails into his own palms. “Where did you go?”

  “To my cousin’s home.” Cadence shook her head. “But that did not work out for long. She did not want me there. Her husband… he had a taste for women who were not his wife,” she tartly said. “And my cousin blamed his advances on me. She was young and newly married. It made her anxious. I can forgive her now, but then, I could not. She turned me out. I slept in the streets for a while, then met an old woman who sold flowers. We worked together for a while. She had even more trouble walking then I did, so I would go to the market each day and get the discarded pickings that had come in from the farms, and we would sell them. Eventually, I procured a position as a maid in a nice household. Things became better after that. At one of my maid jobs, I filled in teaching the children of the household between governesses. And that… led me to my job here. Well, and the mail-order bride agency of course.”

  She finished the story with a tight smile.

  Beau was faintly aware of his mouth hanging open, but for the life of him, he couldn’t get it closed. He’d spent years thinking that he had been through one of the worst things a person could experience, but how wrong he’d been. Cadence had not only lost her parents and become crippled in one day, she had then been turned out by the only family she had left and been forced to sleep in the streets. Any number of things could have happened to her out there.

  Perhaps they did and she just wasn’t telling.

  “Lord, Cadence,” Beau gasped.

  She found his hand. “It is all right, Beau. It is all in the past.”

  “But those things… the slide… your parents… your cousin...”

  She nodded. “And now, here I am. With you.”

  The smoke signal.

  It was one of the smallest details of her story, but the one most painfully burned into his mind. Her parents had lit a fire calling for help and no one had come.

  “Let’s get to supper,” Cadence decisively said. Her face made one thing clear: she was done wallowing in the past.

  Beau dumbly nodded. There were no words. There never would be. How did he tell Cadence, his strong, beautiful bride-to-be, that he was the reason her leg had been maimed and her parents had died?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  23. Cadence

  Chapter twenty-three

  Cadence nibbled anxiously on the side of her fingernail.

  “Nothing is worth doing that over,” Gemma said, forcing Cadence’s hand down before going back to the cook stove and checking the cornbread.

  Cadence gave her a tight smile, the kind that hurt. “I told him too much. Perhaps I should have only revealed a small amount at a time.”

  “No. Do not blame yourself. Beau is surly. He is most likely off processing everything you told him. And he would be doing that no matter if you unloaded it all at once or not.”

  Cadence was not so sure. When she spoke frankly the night before, it initially seemed to set her soul free. But as the hours ticked by, she wondered if she had made a mistake.

  Something was off with Beau throughout supper and he left for bed soon afterward with a terse goodnight. She was almost not surprised to not see him at breakfast the next morning.

  But his sending Nat to take her to school? That, she could not live with. Beau’s regularly accompanying her to or from the schoolhouse had been something they enjoyed together, not something Cadence needed. For him to so flippantly send another in his wake felt like a slap in the face.

  After declining Nat’s offer, she rode off to school on her own, and, later that afternoon, returned on her own as well.

  It was almost supper and still, she had not seen Beau all day. The truth was horrendously obvious. He was avoiding her.

  “He has done this before, you know,” Gemma said,
flipping the pan over and depositing the loaf of steaming cornbread on a waiting cloth. “Beau is the kind of man who needs a lot of time to himself.”

  “Yes, but for what? Everything was just fine yesterday.”

  Gemma gave Cadence a sympathetic look. She knew the bare bones of Cadence’s story, only that her parents had died in the same rock slide that damaged her leg, but beyond that, most everything else was a secret.