At lunchtime there was a knock on the door and she froze. But it was Fred’s voice that called, “It’s only me, Alice,” and she raised herself from the chair and slid back the bolt, stepping behind it as he came in.

“Brought you some soup,” he said, placing a bowl with a cloth draped over its rim on the desk. “Thought you might be getting hungry.”

It was then that he saw her face. She registered the shock, suppressed as quickly as it flared, to be supplanted by something darker, and angrier. He walked to the end of the room and stood there for a minute, his back to her, and it was as if he were suddenly made of something harder, as if his frame had turned to iron.

“Bennett Van Cleve is a fool,” he said, and his jaw barely moved, as if he were having trouble containing himself.

“It wasn’t Bennett.”

It took him a moment to absorb this. “Well, damn.” He walked back and stopped in front of her. She turned her head away from him, color rising in her cheeks, as if it were she who had done something to be ashamed of. “Please,” she said, and she wasn’t sure what she was asking of him.

“Let me see.” He stood before her and lifted his fingertips to her face, studying it with a frown. She closed her eyes as they traced the line of her jaw, his fingers gentle. He was so close she could smell the warmth of his skin, the faint scent of horse he carried on his clothes. “You seen a doctor?”

She shook her head.

“Can you open your mouth?”

She obliged. Then closed it again with a wince. “Brushed my teeth this morning. Think a couple of them may have rattled a bit.”

He didn’t laugh. His fingertips moved up the sides of her face, so gently that she barely felt them, even across the cuts and bruises, the same way they moved softly across a young horse’s spine, checking for misalignments. He frowned as they crossed her cheekbones and met at her forehead where he hesitated, then pushed aside a lock of hair. “I don’t think anything’s broken.” His voice was a low murmur. “Doesn’t make me want to hurt him any less, though.”

It was always the kindness that would kill you. She felt a tear slide slowly down her cheek, and hoped he didn’t see it.

He turned away. She could hear he was now by the desk, clattering a spoon onto it. “It’s tomato. Make it myself with herbs and a little cream. Figured you wouldn’t have brought anything. And it—uh—doesn’t require chewing.”

“I don’t know many men who cook.” Her voice emerged in a little sob.

“Yeah. Well. Would’ve gone pretty hungry by now if I didn’t.”

She opened her eyes and he was placing the spoon to the side of her bowl, laying a folded gingham napkin neatly beside it. For a moment she had a flashback of the place setting the previous evening, but shoved it down. This was Fred, not Van Cleve. And she was surprised to find that she was hungry.

Fred sat while she ate, his feet up in a chair as he read a book of poetry, apparently content to let her be.

She ate almost all the soup, wincing every time she opened her mouth, her tongue occasionally working back toward the two loose teeth. She didn’t speak, because she didn’t know what to say. A strange and unexpected sense of humiliation hung over her, as if she had somehow brought this on herself, as if the bruises on her face were emblematic of her failure. She found herself replaying and replaying the night’s events. Should she have kept quiet? Should she simply have agreed? And yet to do those things would have left her—what? No better than one of those damned dolls.

Fred’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “When I found out my wife was carrying on, I reckon every second man from here to Hoffman asked me why I hadn’t given her a good hiding and brought her home again.”

Alice moved her head stiffly to look at him, but he was studying his book, as if he were reading from the words within it.

“They said I should teach her a lesson. I never got it, not even in the first flush of anger, when I thought she had pretty much stomped all over my heart. You beat a horse and you can break it all right. You can make it submit. But it’ll never forget. And it sure as hell won’t care for you. So if I wouldn’t do it to a horse, I could never work out why I should do it to a human.”

Alice pushed the bowl away slowly as he continued.

“Selena wasn’t happy with me. I knew it, though I didn’t want to think about it. She wasn’t made for out here, with the dust and the horses and the cold. She was a city girl, and I probably paid that too little mind. I was trying to build the business after my daddy died. Guess I thought she’d be like my ma, happy to forge her own path. Three years of it and no babies, I should have known the first sweet-talking salesman to promise her something different would turn her head. But, no, I never laid a hand on her. Not even when she was standing in front of me, suitcase in hand, telling me all the ways I had failed to be a man to her. And I reckon half this town still thinks I’m less of a man because of it.”

Not me, she wanted to tell him, but the words somehow wouldn’t emerge from her mouth.

They sat in silence a while longer, alone with their thoughts. Finally he stood and poured her some coffee, set it before her and walked to the door with the empty bowl. “I’ll be working with Frank Neilsen’s young colt at the near paddock this afternoon. He’s a little unbalanced and prefers the level ground. Anything you’re worried about, you just bang on that window. Okay?”

She didn’t speak.

“I’ll be right here, Alice.”

“Thank you,” she said.

* * *

• • •

She’s my wife. I got a right to talk to her.”

“You think I give a Sam Hill what you—”

Fred got to him first. She had been dozing in the chair—she felt exhausted to her bones—and woke to the sound of voices.

“It’s okay, Fred,” she called out. “Let him in.”

She drew back the bolt and opened the door a sliver.

“Well, then, I’m coming in, too.” Fred walked in behind Bennett so that the two men stood there for a moment, shaking snow from their boots and patting themselves down.

Bennett flinched when he saw her. She hadn’t dared look at her face, but his expression told her much of what she needed to know. He took a breath and rubbed his palm over the back of his head. “You need to come home, Alice,” he said, adding: “He won’t do it again.”

“Since when did you have any say over what your father does, Bennett?” she said.

“He’s promised. He didn’t mean to hit you that hard.”