LETTERS FROM MILES STANLEY STOPPED ARRIVING at the end of January. First Anna was concerned. Then she was angry. And finally came despair.
Whenever time and weather permitted, Anna rode to the line shack, far from the main house, far from Abe’s and Violet’s watching eyes. She rode to their line shack—hers and Miles’s—where she had first confessed her love to him, where she had offered herself to him. Always, she built a fire in the stove and lay on the bed and wrapped herself in a blanket. Then she wept.
He hadn’t said he loved her.
It was clear now that he didn’t love her.
He’d never intended to come back to her.
Had he found someone new? Someone older? Someone prettier?
The pain in her heart was every bit as great as what she’d felt when her parents died. In some ways it was worse, because she knew how much her parents had loved her. They’d told her so often. But not Miles. Miles had kept those words to himself. They’d been implied but never spoken.
Her eighteenth birthday arrived in mid-March. The day mattered little to her. Growing up. Getting older. It didn’t change anything. Miles had said it would but it didn’t, now that he was gone. Now that he was silent.
Then a letter from California came in April, addressed to Anna McKenna. The writing on the envelope didn’t belong to Miles. She knew his writing as well as her own. But her heart skipped at the sight of the address all the same. She opened it.
Dear Miss McKenna,
My name is John Anderson. I’m an attorney. Miles Stanley hired me to put his legal affairs in order early this year. It is my sad duty to inform you of his passing after a lengthy illness and to advise you that you are the sole beneficiary of his last will and testament . . .
There was more writing on the sheet of paper, but the ink blurred before her eyes. The letter fell from her hands and drifted like a feather to the floor.
Then she followed it, blackness swelling over her.