He couldn’t be much older than she was, twenty-four maybe, but he looked so confident. Sandy brown hair a bit too long, as most Westerners wore it, and blue eyes as blue as a summer sky.

He wasn’t like the other men. He never tried to talk to her or kidded her about being so homely that men wouldn’t take her upstairs even if the ride was free.

A few men would try to see if she was developing, but her mother wrapped her breasts every morning before Em slipped on the dress made of rough wool. It hung to her ankles and was hot in the kitchen, but it was the only way her mother would risk her working in the saloon.

If anyone knew she was twenty, she wouldn’t be invisible. So she dressed the part of a girl not grown and shuffled her feet as she stared at the floor.

Eight years ago, when she’d just turned twelve, her father pulled her out of her bed before dawn and said it was time she earned her keep. Two of her sisters had married the year before and the third had run off.

Em was the only one of his worthless daughters left, and her father planned to take advantage of her shy ways. He knew she wouldn’t fight him; he’d beat that out her when she was little. She’d do as she was told. Em, the baby, would never run away. She wouldn’t have the energy after she learned to work. He’d make sure of that.

Em had to play the role or her father swore he’d turn her out to starve. She was small, but beneath her baggy clothes her body was definitely a woman’s. Her mother cut her honey-brown hair blunt to her shoulders with bangs that hung in her eyes. As time passed, she braided it so her mother wouldn’t cut it again.

At first she just washed dishes at the saloon where her father tended bar. She hauled supplies for the tiny kitchen, kept the fire going, and helped the old cook. When the cook died two years later, Em did both jobs.

Her father made sure she never saw her pay.

Though she had three sisters, her father swore Em would never leave him. Her hair was usually dull brown from the cook stove’s smoke. As it grew longer, she stuffed it in an old hat she’d found left in the bar. Her skin was dull from never seeing the sun, and her body thin. Em’s arms were scarred from burns. It had taken her a year to grow strong enough to lift the heavy pots without occasionally bumping her skin.