Nodding, Win said, “I don’t remember anything that will help you. I was told Ma died birthing a child. I remember no one had said that there was a baby on the way to me. It was a complete shock. The news of a child lost. The news of my ma dying. I got sent over here. Katherine, Wyatt and Cheyenne’s mother, had come over and offered to take care of me.”

“What about your father? He does no work that I could see. It’s not like he was out laboring on the range every day.”

Win shook her head, such a tiny motion . . . Wyatt could barely tell she heard and reacted.

“I guess he felt he wasn’t up to caring for a child.”

No one mentioned that she wasn’t an infant. She didn’t need care so much as love. Wyatt was glad she’d come over here where she had a chance to find it.

“I stayed here for a few years until I was old enough for boarding school.”

“In St. Louis, not Chicago. That struck me as strange,” Hobart said between bites of stuffing. “Why not send you back to the town where you were born, where your parents were from? Hawkins could have much more easily contacted someone there to ask about schools.”

“I have few memories of my grandparents, but I met an elderly lady in St. Louis who’d known them. I found out they were wealthy, influential people in Chicago. They were completely against my parents’ marriage. My ma, my grandparents’ only child, had been a bright, socially active woman who loved people and dancing and pretty gowns. After she married, she all but vanished from society. She had a child, and people didn’t think it was so strange that she’d stay at home for that. But then there were rumors that she’d become frail. Melancholy. After my grandparents died, my parents moved out here. This woman in St. Louis was a good friend of my grandmother. She still carried all the worries Grandmother had shared with her around like weights.”

“I should have looked into the circumstances of their deaths,” Hobart muttered to herself.

Win gasped. She swallowed hard and went on. “My pa wanted to be a land baron.”

Wyatt made a particularly rude noise before he could stop himself.

No one looked away from Win. “Then Ma died. Since I talked with that woman in St. Louis, I’ve begun to remember things. Ma crying. Loud shouting. Bruises. It’s all dim and muddled by the years and my youth.”

Win’s eyes came up and locked on Hobart. “I can hardly bear to be around Pa now. I’ve wondered if I’m being fair to him. But there’s something there, something in his eyes. Maybe I’m imagining it, but he—he scares me.”