For a moment Anna thought Leah would balk, but finally she said, “My father and mother were missionaries called by God to educate the heathen savages.” She took up her unused salad fork and peered at it, as if looking at her own reflection.

A lot of the old wolves still took for granted things Anna’s generation tended to give more careful evaluation. Even so, Anna would never have thought the Leah she knew would have been able to utter such a sentiment seriously, but if there was sarcasm intended, Anna couldn’t pick it up in Leah’s voice.

“I was fifteen—the oldest of six children,” Leah continued. What Leah said certainly had the ring of truth, but her casual tone hid more mass than the visible top of an iceberg did. “And Papa packed us all up in a wagon and headed west.”

“This was when?” asked Anna. She might not know Leah’s story, but she knew her husband’s history. He’d been a child when Bran brought back Leah. “Late 1820s or early 1830s?”

History had not been her best subject, but living in a pack of wolves that encompassed individuals born before the Mayflower left port had upped her game. Leah’s father’s expedition west seemed pretty early. The Civil War and the California Gold Rush were both in the middle of the nineteenth century. The western expansion had mostly been driven by those two events.

Leah shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t remember. Our church funded us to fuel the salvation of pagan souls.” There was the thread of cynicism Anna had felt but not really heard. “Papa packed us all in a wagon—except for my littlest brother, who was only a few months old. He stayed with my aunt and her family. The idea was we would get settled and then my aunt and uncle would come join us.”

She huffed an unamused laugh, and her foot began to tap a rhythm on the tile floor. “He had no idea what he was doing, my papa. Big dreams and no common sense. We ran out of food first. Then my little brother James broke his leg and died from the infection that set in.”

She was speaking in a quick, light monotone—as if she couldn’t bear to actually think about the words she was using.