But Montana didn’t care about shame.
Montana cared about weather, wood, water, and whether you could keep your own heartbeat steady when the wind tried to shake it loose.
Three months after stepping off a stagecoach in a dusty little town called Willowbrook, Eleanor sat on the half-finished porch of her cabin and turned an old wooden cross between her fingers. Her father had carved it when she was a girl, back when Boston still felt like the whole universe and faith seemed as simple as breathing.
Now she traced each groove as if it might become a map.
“Did You forget me?” she whispered to the sky, half angry, half pleading. “Or did You just send me somewhere You knew I couldn’t fake it anymore?”
A gust snapped through the clearing like a whip. The cabin frame creaked. Her hair, pinned up with expensive bone pins that now looked ridiculous beside her dirt-streaked cheeks, came loose in strands.
Eleanor sighed and set the cross down gently, as if placing a fragile bird back in its nest.
