the prairie outside Ashwood Crossing, Kansas wore winter like an old scab. The wind never stopped talking. It worried fence posts, worried roofs, worried the corners of a woman’s mind until thoughts came loose and went skittering away like tumbleweed.
Eleanor Hart had learned to live without thinking.
Two winters ago, a fever had taken her husband, Caleb, and then their little girl, Millie, so quickly the house had not even cooled between bodies. The doctor had called it “God’s will” with the practiced gentleness of a man who didn’t have to sleep in the same room where a child had stopped breathing.
After the funerals, Eleanor’s world shrank to a strict geometry: cabin, garden, well, chicken coop. It was a life built out of chores because chores did not ask questions. A life built out of repetition because repetition dulled the sharp edge of memory.
