Kat holds Sarah while I help Belinda with the breakfast dishes. Then I bring down the travel case we brought, which now holds Kat’s clothes as well as one of Belinda’s nightgowns and a couple of her shirtwaists and skirts.

Elliot is taking Kat and me to the train station in San Mateo, where we will board a train that will stop first in San Jose and then continue on to Los Angeles, with stops in between. From Los Angeles we will board another train to Tucson. I’m grateful for the ride to the station, but I’m not looking forward to sitting with Elliot, with Kat between us, for twenty minutes.

“He can’t ask me about Martin,” I told Belinda when she said he’d be at the house at nine o’clock to fetch Kat and me. “He can’t say one word about him. Not with Kat there in the buggy.”

“He knows he can’t, Sophie,” she assured me. “He won’t.”

And she is right. After our good-byes—Kat, already protecting her wounded heart, barely acknowledges Belinda and the baby as we bid farewell—we take off in the buggy and Elliot fills the silence with talk of the land and his shop and how his father and grandfather were carpenters before him.

It seems in no time at all we are back at the train station in San Mateo.

“You have everything?” Elliot says after Kat and I are standing on the pavement in front of the depot.

I have money for the train tickets, the travel case, Candace’s letter and the other documents I took from Martin’s desk, the rest of the cash from the strongbox in a borrowed handbag. Kat.

“Yes.”

Elliot and I stand and look at each other. So much could be said; so much won’t be.

“Thank you for your help,” I finally say.

“I did nothing. You are the one who did everything. I can never repay you for it. You saved her life. In more ways than one.”

“You still love her?” I am sure of this, but I ask anyway.

“Always. I will never love anyone else.”

This man perplexes and amazes me. I eye Kat, a few feet away from us. She is staring off in the distance, detached from the moment and my conversation with Elliot. I turn back to him.

“Even though she married another man?” I ask quietly.

He shrugs. “I don’t think love is something you can start and stop by choosing. Our hearts tell us who we will love, not the other way.”

“You must’ve wanted him to disappear from the moment she met him.”

Elliot considers my words for a moment. “Am I glad he’s gone? Yes. Did I wish him gone? No. She cared for him.”

“She won’t always, Elliot.”

“I know,” he says. “I can wait.”

“That baby is a sweet little thing. She takes after her mother, I think.”

He smiles. “You are no doubt right.” He then hands me a piece of paper with the address of his carpentry shop written on it and a telephone number. “If anything happens and you need help right away, send me a telegram, or if you can get to a telephone, place a call to me. I’ll pay for the charges.”