On her way back to the kitchen, she grabbed another lemon bar. Then she went back and sat down on the floor in front of the coffee table, trying to make sense out of the essay in front of her that made some very... Factually inaccurate claims about Mark Twain.

She sighed.

Sometimes she wondered if the kids—especially the high schoolers—listened in class at all.

When she’d taken the job at the beginning of the last school year, she really hadn’t known what to expect. A massive ranch in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, Four Corners was almost its own town. A couple hundred people worked the ranch and those families lived on or around the property. There was no school close by and a hundred and ten years earlier they’d built the schoolhouse on the grounds to teach all of the kids.

Some kids, it was her understanding, had been there all their lives. Some rotated in and out quickly, their families more transient in nature than the others.

One thing was certain—it wasn’t boring.

And this was...

Well, it was a life. One far away from Kansas and free from her overbearing mother and all of her sisters, who were still so deeply entrenched in their mother’s neuroses and control that they fluttered around her like hens in modest dress, constantly seeking to please her, never putting a foot out of line...

Tala had gone to college.

Her mother had hated that. She’d been naturally suspicious of higher learning, especially for women.

In fairness, her mother was suspicious of everything.

Movies, TV, sugar, food coloring, men, the postal service, books...

The list went on.

But Tala had always felt like it was wrong.

They’d only gone to school for one year that Tala could remember, but it had changed her life. Miss Taylor had been the sweetest, most wonderful woman Tala had ever met. And she’d answered Tala’s questions.

She hadn’t told her that questions led to judgment. She hadn’t made her feel like she was bad or guilty for wanting answers about the world.

Miss Taylor had made Tala certain, at eight years old, that she wanted to be a teacher too.

So she would know things. So she could tell other people.

“And now all this is mine.” She lifted her teacup and waved it around the room.

Maybe her life wasn’t particularly glamorous, but it never had been. It was hers. That was what mattered.

She heard a resounding thump outside and jumped. It was the wind, she reassured herself. Of course it was the wind.

Her little cottage was nestled into the back corner of Sullivan’s Point, which was a horse ranch and farm, one of the four parcels of land that made up the larger ranch. Many of the cabins on the property were rustic, but her place was a cute little cottage with flower boxes on the windows and yellow shutters and she loved it.

And if a tree branch landed in her flowers she would...