Twice this week.
My stomach tightened.
Who prepared it?
He looked toward the kitchen.
For the first time since our wedding, I saw something approaching fear in my husband’s expression.
He wrote:
I thought you did.
I stared at him.
“I never touched your coffee.”
He could not hear those words, but he understood the sudden change in my face.
We spent the remainder of that night sitting beside the fireplace, neither willing to sleep.
At dawn, I wrapped the leech in a sealed glass preserving jar and placed it inside my coat.
Gideon tried to stop me from leaving.
I explained that I needed a doctor.
He wrote:
Vane knows the doctors in Coldwater.
I answered:
Then I will find one he doesn’t control.
He considered that before adding another sentence.
Take Nell’s horse.
She knows the safest road.
Nell Voss lived two miles south of the ranch.
She was a fifty-four-year-old widow who had helped Gideon manage his cattle since his uncle’s death.
I had met her only twice, but both times she had treated me with a warmth that seemed almost unfamiliar.
She also knew enough of Gideon’s handwritten signs to communicate without always reaching for a notebook.
When I arrived at her cottage, she noticed the blood on my sleeve before I spoke.
“Good Lord, child.
