“I don’t know any rich young men, but I’d wager Martin was not like those wealthy sons. He wasn’t one to put on airs. He put on masks.”

Candace is quiet for a second. “Yes,” she says vacantly, looking past me as if to gaze upon the years before. “He was different. I’d forgotten that’s what I had liked best about him.”

“That he was not like your other beaux?”

Candace sighs lightly, remembering a happier time, perhaps. “Yes. He hadn’t come from money. He was just a stable hand, and he worked hard and took good care of my horse. He was quiet and polite and didn’t strut about like a peacock. He was so handsome, but he never acted like he knew he was.”

Now Candace turns her head to face the desert landscape. “Martin was the first man I ever lay with,” she says softly. “Being with him in that way was like . . . like touching starlight. Like being made of starlight. When I found myself carrying his child and I told him, his first response wasn’t ‘What are you going to do?’ but ‘What can I do for you?’ I said, ‘You can marry me.’ He just smiled and said, ‘It would be my honor.’”

She pauses a moment in happy reverie.

“How old were you?” I ask.

Candace turns back to me. “I was eighteen, old enough. We went before a justice of the peace and didn’t tell anyone for a month. He kept saying we should tell my parents, and I kept saying I wanted to wait for the right time. And he finally said, ‘That time will never come, Candace.’ He was right. We told them and my father exploded like a stick of dynamite. He accused Martin right then of only marrying me for my grandmother’s trust, which I was set to come into on my twenty-first birthday. I told my father he was wrong, that Martin married me because he loved me and his child that I was carrying. They were devastated when I said that. Oh, the looks on their faces. And then my father accused Martin of getting me pregnant on purpose because he’d learned my grandmother’s inheritance only passes to my offspring and not to a spouse. Father told Martin he wouldn’t see a penny of that money, nor any of his money, either. He said he’d disinherit me before he’d see the likes of Martin getting one cent.”

Candace looks off again into the golden horizon.

“I am so sorry that happened to you,” I say. I don’t know what other words to offer her.

“My mother just sat there weeping,” Candace continues in a faraway voice. “Martin said very quietly that we should go, so we did. The whole time we were walking away from them, my father was shouting at me that I had ruined my life, and their lives, and that I wasn’t welcome in that house. I didn’t hear from my parents for a long time. Not even when I lost that baby at six months.”