Prologue

Preston Farm, near Albany, New York

Saturday, May 14, 1853

“Ow. Ow. Ow!”

Zoe, aged twelve, lifted her left thumb off the linen and glared at it. A bright red bead gathered on the pad.

The needle was still pinned through the cloth, looking smug.

“That,” she informed it, “was uncalled for.”

She glared down at the small wooden hoop in her lap. Her mother had drawn a rosebud onto the cloth in faint pencil that morning, all soft curves and curled petals, with a single delicate leaf at the base. Around the rosebud, six rows of green silk lay in stitches so crooked they appeared to be running for their lives.

The first robin of the season landed on the porch railing and cocked its head at her, as if to offer a critique.

“Don’t even think about it,” Zoe muttered, lowering the hoop. “I’ve heard quite enough today.”

The robin twitched its tail and flew off, which only proved her point.

She had given up on this particular rosebud six times this morning. The seventh failure now sat in her lap. She held it close to her face, then pulled it back. The view didn’t improve at any distance.

The kitchen door creaked behind her. Warm bread and yeast and woodsmoke drifted onto the porch. Zoe’s stomach growled at a volume her mother surely heard.

“Coax the cloth, Zoe Marie,” Mama said gently as she eased onto the bench beside her. “It’s shy.”

Mama settled with a small grunt and the rustle of starched cotton. She smelled of flour, lavender water, and the faint tang of the apple butter she had been stirring all morning. Her dark hair, the same wild curls Zoe had inherited, was pinned up in a knot, and a streak of flour ran from her temple to her jaw.

“This cloth would make better kindling than embroidery, Mama,” Zoe replied without looking at her. “I am only doing what it asks.”

“You will not burn the cloth the day before the Lord’s Day, child,” Mama said firmly.

“It’s Saturday,” Zoe muttered.

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” Mama replied with patience, holding out her hand. “The cloth knows. Hand it over.”

Zoe sighed and passed the hoop.

Mama held it close, examined the rosebud from every angle, and pressed her lips together, careful not to laugh.

“It’s a brave little stitch,” she said at last.

“Mama,” Zoe groaned.

“Brave,” Mama repeated solemnly.

“You’re too kind.”

“Honest,” Mama corrected with a small smile. “The needle has clearly seen battle. The thread, less so. The thread has surrendered.”

Zoe collapsed against her mother’s shoulder, laughing so hard the hoop slid off Mama’s lap. When she straightened, Mama had already pulled the worst of the snarl free and threaded a fresh length of green silk through her needle.

“Watch,” Mama said softly.

She lowered the linen onto her own lap and worked a single stitch, slow enough that Zoe could see how the silk slid through the holes she had already made.

“Short and steady, Zoe,” Mama instructed quietly. “The needle is a guest. You ask it in. The thread will follow.”

“It feels like an enemy,” Zoe complained.

“That’s because you have decided it is,” Mama answered gently. “Decide otherwise.”

Mama tipped her head, and Zoe leaned closer to peer at the small line of green stitches walking along the curve of the rosebud’s stem. Even, smooth, all of them lying down the same direction. They were lovely.

“Mine look as though a goat had been at the linen,” Zoe muttered. “How,” she added, frustration creeping into her voice, “do you have so much patience?”

“Borrowed,” Mama replied simply.

“From whom?”

Mama tapped the small embroidered cross hanging at her throat, and her smile softened. “From the one who made the goats.”

Zoe rolled her eyes. Mama caught her at it and pinched the back of her arm without taking her gaze from the needle.

“Ow,” Zoe yelped.

“That is for rolling your eyes at the Almighty,” Mama said calmly.

“I rolled them at you,” Zoe protested.

“He will lend you to me when I need it,” Mama replied with a small smile. “Now stitch, and recite for me what you read this morning.”

Zoe took the hoop back. She set the tip of the needle against the linen, drew a breath, and pushed it through. It wobbled. She tried again, and this stitch wobbled less. The third sat almost steady.

“Be still,” she recited softly, “and know that I am God.”

“And then?” Mama prompted.

“I will be exalted among the heathen.”

“And?”

“I will be exalted in the earth.”

“There. Better already,” Mama said warmly, leaning over to tap Zoe’s stitch line. “Be still, Zoe Marie. The needle answers to a still hand.”

Footsteps thundered on the porch boards and the screen door slammed open hard enough to make a robin shriek from the apple tree at the end of the yard.

“Zo!” Brody called.

Her stitch was, finally, going somewhere respectable. She would not be put off course by her brother.

“Zo!” he repeated, louder.

“Brody, can you not see I am communing with the saints,” she said dryly, eyes on her work.

“You’re communing with a piece of cloth,” he replied.

“Same thing, today.”

He clattered into view with their father’s pale eyes, nothing like Zoe’s own green ones, and a streak of sawdust across his forehead. Brody squinted at her hoop, leaned closer, and made a small choking noise that meant a face had been pulled.

“What’s it meant to be?” he asked.

“A rose,” Zoe answered, daring him to disagree.

“It looks like Pa’s beard after he gets caught in the wind,” Brody said with a grin.

“Brody,” Zoe warned.

“I’m only telling the truth, as a brother ought,” he replied sweetly.

Mama’s hand came up between them. Brody, who had learned at age six that her hand meant business, took two steps back.

“Did Pa send you for something, son?” Mama asked patiently. “Or are you here to bring suffering on your sister?”

“Pa sent me for the big bucket,” Brody answered. “And he says to tell Eleanor he wants two of whatever is on the stove for supper, on account of how he is wasting away out there in the field.”

Mama lifted one eyebrow. “Does he?”

“His exact words, Mama. I am only the messenger.”

“Tell your father his messenger is going to be wasting away in the woodshed if he doesn’t collect that bucket and remove himself from this porch.”

“Yes, Mama,” Brody replied, with the grin of a boy who had delivered exactly the sentence he had been sent to deliver and was now free of the consequences. “The suffering is a gift.”

“Out,” Mama ordered.

“Yes, Mama,” Brody replied dutifully.

He retreated with a wink at Zoe, who flicked her needle at him and missed his cheek by the grace of God and his fast reflexes.

“Brody has a point about the rose,” Mama said gently when the screen door had banged shut. “But only a small one.”

“I know,” Zoe murmured.

“You’re learning,” Mama reassured her. “The first row is always the worst row. After that, your hands remember.”

Zoe pulled the silk through. The next stitch sat down beside its neighbor and behaved itself.

“There,” Mama said softly. “Look at that. A little still hand, a little patience borrowed from above, and the rose begins to bloom.”

Zoe felt it, then. A small warm thing settling in her chest near her breastbone. She had no name for it. She bent closer to her work and tried not to grin.

Mama held up the hoop in the spring light. Five whole stitches now, walking in line down the stem of the rose, neat and tidy, almost as though a person had made them on purpose.

“Stitch by stitch, Zoe Marie,” Mama said quietly. “That is how everything in life is made. Bread. A house. A marriage. A rose. You don’t throw the whole thing down because the first stitch wobbles. You set the needle, and you go again.”

Zoe rested her cheek against her mother’s shoulder. The lavender water. The flour. The apple butter. The warm bread smell of her. Every good thing in one place.

“What if the cloth itself is bad, Mama?” Zoe asked softly.

“Then you ask the Lord for a new bolt,” Mama answered without hesitation.

“And if He is busy?”

“Then you wait, my brave little stitch,” Mama said tenderly. “You wait, and you keep your needle in your hand.”

Far at the end of the yard, the apple tree sighed in the spring wind, and a pair of robins, one after the other, lifted off into the bright blue sky.

“Mama,” Zoe said after a moment.

“Yes, my brave little stitch?”

“When I am grown… Do you think I will have a kitchen of my own? And a husband who laughs at my jokes? And a porch with a railing for a robin to sit on?”

Mama was quiet for a moment, then she set her hand on top of Zoe’s head, light and warm.

“I think the Lord has been making the cloth for that life since before you were born, Zoe Marie,” she said softly. “Your job is to keep stitching, even when you cannot yet see the rose. Promise me.”

“I promise, Mama.”

Zoe set the needle against the linen.

She went again.

Chapter One

Preston Ranch, near Albany, New York

Tuesday, June 4, 1867

The dough fought back, and Zoe was glad of the fight.

At twenty-six, she had learned that flour beneath her fingernails was finer company than silence at the kitchen table. On the mornings Brody rode out early for the south pasture, the silence in the kitchen carried weight enough to bruise. Better to knead and better to push the heel of her hand into flour and water and yeast and salt and watch the dough yield, breath by breath, than to sit with her hands folded and wait for whatever came next.

“Brody,” she called, hearing his footfalls on the back stairs. “Coffee’s still warm if you want a second cup.”

“No time, Zo,” her brother answered from the hall. The old name floated in. He had used it for her since she was small enough to fit under his arm, and Zoe paused in her kneading and held it for a moment in her ears.

He stepped into the doorway, already in his coat, his dark hair damp from the washbasin and his pale eyes squinting against the bright morning. He had grown into their father’s frame in the past year, broad through the shoulders and tall enough to fill a doorway. The resemblance still struck her sometimes when the light caught him a certain way.

“Storm coming in from the west by Thursday,” he said, pulling on his gloves. “I want the stock down off the high field before then.”

“I’ll have stew waiting,” Zoe replied, smiling at him.

“You’re a good sister, Zo.”

He crossed the kitchen in three strides and kissed the top of her head, as he had since she was eight and he’d been tall enough to reach. The smell of him, for a brief moment, was lye soap and saddle leather and her childhood. Then he was gone, the back door clattering shut behind him.

Zoe watched the door for a long second. The dough sagged under her hands.

Lord, she prayed silently, as she had prayed every morning for a year, keep him mine. I know You gave him a wife and I am glad of it. But he was my brother first, and I am asking You, please, do not let me lose him.

Footsteps padded down the front stairs. Bonnie—Brody’s wife—had a tread Zoe could pick out in any room of the house: light, slow and deliberate. Every step was a small announcement.

“Oh, you’re up,” Bonnie said sweetly as she rounded the corner into the kitchen, pulling her wrapper closer around her narrow waist. “I didn’t hear you.”

The morning light caught her where she stopped in the doorway, picking out the gold in her hair and the smooth line of her cheek. She was very lovely, Bonnie. Twenty-one, with a small straight nose and high color and an even row of perfect teeth, the sum of which, by her own frequent accounting, had turned strangers’ heads on the street since she was thirteen. Brody had walked into her at a town dance two years past and come home grinning like a man struck on the head with the prettiest hammer the Lord ever made.

He had married her three months later, and Zoe had kissed her new sister on both cheeks at the wedding and prayed they would all be happy.

The Lord was working on the happy. Zoe trusted Him. She did wish He would hurry.

“Coffee’s still warm,” Zoe offered, gesturing toward the iron stove with a floured wrist. “And there’s bread starting.”

“I see that.” Bonnie crossed to the table, lifted the cloth off the rising dough, and looked down at it for a long moment. “It’s a little heavy, isn’t it?”

“It’s fine. The yeast was new this week.”

“Mama always said heavy bread was a sign of a heavy hand,” Bonnie said, smiling. “But you do your best, I’m sure.”

Zoe drew in a breath through her nose and pushed her palms into the dough.

Be still. Be still.

“Did Brody say when he’d be in for supper?” Bonnie asked, taking a cup down from the shelf and pouring herself coffee.

“Storm coming Thursday. He’ll be working long days till then.”

“Mm. Pity.”

Bonnie sat at the head of the table, in Brody’s chair, where their father used to sit, and where Zoe still pulled the tablecloth straight every morning out of an old habit she had carried from the days when her father still filled it. Bonnie sipped her coffee with a small, satisfied sigh.

“How’s the new pattern coming?” Bonnie asked after a moment. “The one for the parlor cushion?”

The mock interest was a sharper instrument than the dig at the bread. Zoe forced her hands to keep moving.

“Well enough,” she answered. “I hope to finish it before the harvest.”

“Oh, before the harvest. Goodness. So a year, you mean.”

A small laugh, like a bell. Zoe smiled because a smile was the safest thing to do.

“Two months at most.”

“Take your time, Zo. We aren’t in any rush. It is your home, after all. For as long as you need it.”

There it was. The little kindness that left a mark.

Bonnie set her cup down with a small click.

“Have you given any thought to where you’ll go, Zoe?” she asked lightly.

“Where I’ll go?”

“Eventually. Brody and I have been talking. The baby will come in winter, you see, and we’ll need the small bedroom for the nursery. I thought it kinder if you and I spoke first, woman to woman.”

Zoe’s hands stopped in the dough.

“You’re with child?”

“Three months. Brody is over the moon.”

“Oh, Bonnie. That’s wonderful news!”

“It is, isn’t it?” Bonnie’s smile was lovely and even and aimed straight at her. “We’ve been thinking about the future. How the house will work? Where the new one will sleep? We’ll need that room, Zoe. By Christmas.”

The kitchen was very quiet. The dough sat under Zoe’s hands, half-warm and half-formed.

“By Christmas?” she repeated.

“You’re twenty-six, Zoe. There must be somewhere for you to go. A boarding house in town. Cousins, maybe? Aunt Iris in Buffalo took her sister in once, after the sister had passed marrying age and never found anyone. There are places for women in your circumstances. We’ll help you find one and send a little money, even.”

Bonnie reached across the table and laid her hand on Zoe’s flour-dusted wrist, warm and friendly and final.

“Brody loves you,” Bonnie said softly. “He is too soft to say it. So I am being the strong one. Wives must be.”

Zoe pulled her wrist back. Her face grew very hot, then very cold, and somewhere underneath the heat and the cold, a crack began to form.

She wiped her hands on her apron slowly, finger by finger.

“I think,” she said, as steady as she could manage, “I’d like to step outside for a moment.”

“Of course you would, dear.”

The garden behind the house was a wall of June. Roses tangled along the south fence in pink and red, peonies bloomed fat as fists, and the iris bed her mother had planted twenty years ago was heavy with purple and gold. Zoe walked into the middle, blind to all of it, and sat down hard on the stone bench beside the apple tree.

For a moment, she could only breathe.

The apple tree above her dropped a single soft petal onto the back of her hand. Then another. Then five at once, like a small mercy from above.

“Lord,” she whispered.

Her words ran out. She bent forward and pressed her forehead against her knees.

“Lord, You see me. I know You see me. I do not know what I am to do.”

The honeybees worked the iris bed and went on with their morning. A wren in the elm at the end of the garden made an opinion known to the world. The breeze that came down from the orchard smelled of cut hay and warm earth.

“I have prayed for Brody. I have prayed for Bonnie. I have prayed for myself to be smaller and quieter and easier in this house and here I am, Lord, at twenty-six, kneading bread in a kitchen that doesn’t want me, and now there is to be a baby, and I am to be without a roof over me. I cannot be smaller anymore. There is no smaller for me to be.”

She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. Her shoulders shook.

“Tell me what to do,” she whispered. “Please. Anything. I will go anywhere.”

“Zoe Marie.”

Zoe lifted her head.

Elsie Keller stood at the gate in the south fence, a small basket on her arm and concern softening her old face. Her grey hair was tucked under a sun bonnet, and her apron was striped blue and white from the morning’s washing. She had been Zoe’s mother’s friend before she was Zoe’s, and she had an uncanny gift; she had always arrived at the kitchen door at the moments Zoe most needed her, as though she kept a calendar in heaven.

“Mrs. Keller,” Zoe managed, scrubbing at her face with the heel of her hand. “Forgive me. I was just…”

“Praying,” Elsie said gently, lifting the latch and letting herself through. “I heard. Forgive me for listening. The wind was carrying.”

She crossed the iris bed in a few quick steps, set her basket down on the bench, and sat beside Zoe in one easy motion. She smelled of lemon balm and oatmeal soap, and her shoulder, when she put her arm around Zoe, was thin and warm and exactly like Mama’s had been.

Zoe held still for one breath, two, and then she broke.

She wept against Mrs. Keller’s shoulder for what could have been a minute or could have been ten. Mrs. Keller held her steady, and her hand made slow circles between Zoe’s shoulder blades, patient as a sundial.

When Zoe could speak again, she sat up and wiped her eyes on the corner of her sleeve.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Keller.”

“For what, child?”

“For weeping on you.”

“My apron has been wept on by worse women than you, Zoe,” Elsie said, smiling soft and sad. “Tell me what’s happened.”

Zoe drew a breath and she told Mrs. Keller everything. The bread, the cushion pattern, the chair at the head of the table. The baby. The little bedroom that would be needed by the first snow. The hand on her wrist.

Wives must be.

Elsie listened until Zoe had finished. Then she sat very still for a long moment, with her hand laid against Zoe’s cheek and her old blue eyes far away.

“That girl,” Elsie said at last, almost to herself, “wants a switching.”

A wet, hiccupping laugh broke out of Zoe.

“Mrs. Keller!”

“I’ll save it for later. I am too old to lift my arm, in any case.” Elsie patted her cheek and let her hand drop. “Now. Listen to me, Zoe Marie.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I came over this morning to bring you eggs,” Elsie said briskly. “I had two dozen and a heart full of news, and the news has been pressing at me for three days. I thought to myself, today, I will tell her today. And here you are in tears, and that is the Lord at His old work. Are you listening?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you remember Mary Collins?”

Zoe blinked. The name reached her from a long way off.

“Of course. Your friend who passed.”

“My dearest.” Mrs. Keller stopped for a while. “The summer before your mother. Mary and I grew up two miles apart, two hayfields and one creek between us, and when she married Joseph and went out to Montana with him, I thought my heart would break for the loss of her. I wrote her every Sunday for thirty years. She has been gone six years now.”

“I am sorry, Mrs. Keller.”

“Listen to me, child. Mary had two boys and a girl. The girl is gone now too, the Lord rest her, and her little daughter has been taken in by Mary’s eldest, Wade Collins. Wade is thirty-three. He runs the ranch his father built. He was the apple of Mary’s eye, that boy, and the most stubborn creature the Lord ever set on a horse, but his heart is true. Joseph passed shortly after Mary, in a fire, and Wade has been running the place alone since.”

Elsie reached into her basket and pulled out a folded square of paper.

“He’s looking for a wife.”

The words sat very still in the warm June air.

“A wife?” Zoe repeated.

“He needs help with the little girl, Sadie. She’s eight, bright, and has a temper, by Wade’s reckoning, that could light a stove. He wrote to me last month and asked if I knew of any young woman of good character and patient hand who might consider the thing. I thought of you, Zoe Marie, the moment I read the letter. I thought of you that very morning. I have been praying on it ever since.”

Elsie held the folded paper out.

“This is his address. The rest is between you and the Lord.”

Zoe took the paper.

Her fingers were trembling. The paper rattled faintly between them. She pressed her thumb against the fold to still it.

“Montana,” she said.

The word came out of her mouth more steady than she felt. She had a sudden, ridiculous urge to laugh.

A whole different country. A child she had never met. A husband she had never met.

“Mrs. Keller,” she said carefully. “I have never raised a child.”

“You raised Brody,” Elsie replied.

“Brody was my brother.”

“He was ten when your mother passed, Zoe Marie. You were fifteen. You raised him.”

Zoe held the paper.

“And what if I do not suit him?” she asked quietly. “This man. What if I cross two thousand miles and arrive on his step and he takes one look at me and decides I will not do?”

“Then,” Elsie said, with a small steady smile, “he will be the second fool in this story, and you will come home and we will find you another door. There is more than one door, Zoe. You are not too old. You are twenty-six.”

Zoe gave a small, wet laugh.

“Two thousand miles, give or take,” Elsie went on, gentler now. “The mountains are cold, and the people are few, and the Lord is louder out there than He is in New York, in my opinion.” She laid her thin hand over Zoe’s. “It is a wide country, child. There is room enough out there for one tired soul to find space.”

The bees worked the iris bed. The wren made another opinion known. Somewhere down the road, a wagon rolled by and a man’s voice carried over the orchard, calling to a horse.

Zoe closed her hand around the paper.

“Will you help me write to him, Mrs. Keller?” she asked quietly.

“I have pen, ink, and an empty afternoon,” Elsie replied, getting to her feet. “I came prepared, Zoe Marie.”

The old woman lifted her basket and held out her hand. Zoe took it and rose.

Behind them, in the warm yellow kitchen of her brother’s house, the dough was finishing its rise, alone, untouched, swelling toward a loaf that would feed a stranger at a stranger’s table.

In the apple tree, a robin landed.

It cocked its head at Zoe.

She set her shoulders, which was easier said than done. She walked out of the iris bed beside Mrs. Keller, into the bright June morning, with her mother’s voice in her ear and a stranger’s address folded in her flour-streaked hand.

Stitch by stitch, Zoe Marie. You set the needle, and you go again.

She had a letter to write.