“To me, as well.”
“Do you remember—”
She spoke at the same time. “Do you think—”
They both stopped.
He lifted his hand to indicate he would stop. “You go ahead.”
“No, you go first.”
“Very well. Do you remember when they took us to the circus in town?”
She made a sound, half laugh, half sigh. “It was exciting. The elephants, the clowns, the tightrope walker. What did you like best?”
“The cowboys riding and roping.”
“Is that when you decided you wanted to be a cowboy?”
He shook his head. “Before my pa died, we lived on a ranch of sorts. It was small. But we had cows and horses and other animals. We had a mare due to foal and Pa had said the foal was to be mine. But he died of pneumonia and Ma sold everything, including the mare and my unborn foal.” He drew in a deep breath. “Why am I telling you this? It’s the past.”
She squeezed his hand. “I never knew that. You never said.”
“Because there is no point in regretting what is gone. A man needs to look ahead not back.”
“I’m sorry. But aren’t you soon going to get what you lost back then?”
He turned to her, his eyebrows raised in question.
“Your own ranch. Surely you’ll have foals now.”
He nodded. Was he unknowingly trying to replace what he’d lost?
“Mr. Porter gave us each a nickel at the circus,” she reminded him.
He readily let his thoughts return to those happy times. “I bought cotton candy with mine.”
“You shared it with me. Remember?”
He turned to her, met her eyes, felt drawn into their shared memories. “I’d forgotten.” Their look went on and on, searching, remembering, perhaps regretting all they’d lost.
“What were you going to say?” he asked her.
She turned from him to study her hands in her lap. “Do you think God is angry with us?” she whispered. “For making vows we have no intention of keeping?”
“I wondered the same thing, then I recalled something Bertie said to us.”
“Bertie? Who is that?”
“Bertie and Cookie run the cookhouse at the Eden Valley Ranch. There isn’t a church nearby yet, though the building is almost finished in Edendale. In the meantime, we’ve had Sunday services in the cookhouse. Bertie always gives a little talk rather than a sermon. What he says makes a lot of sense.”
“And he said something that made it okay to lie to God?” Her voice revealed a healthy dose of skepticism.
“No, but perhaps God understands we didn’t have a choice. I remember Bertie saying, ‘He knows our frame, He remembers we are dust.’ Sometimes maybe we just have to do what seems best and pray God will change things if that isn’t right.”
“But to vow?”
He wished he could find words to comfort her, but his conscience stung as much as hers.
“I would expect God to turn His back on us,” he said, “but I don’t think He has.”
She grabbed his hand and pulled his attention to her. “When that man pulled me from the stagecoach, I could have been badly hurt. The baby—” She shuddered and couldn’t continue.
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders hoping she felt his strength but not an echo of the fear that had shot through him with more force than the bullet that had torn through his arm.
“God helped me land in a way that didn’t hurt either of us,” she managed to say.
He nodded, unable to speak past the tightness in his throat. If something had happened to her or the baby, or Missy...
She gave him a curious look. “Don’t you agree?”
He swallowed hard and forced the words from his throat. “Thank You, God,” he said, looking upward, then he turned to her. “You’re okay. You are, aren’t you? You’re not just pretending?”
“I’m fine. And you know the first thought that ran through my head was the same. I thanked God, too.”
Her look went on and on, touching chords deep within his heart, awakening memories of shared times, filling him with a desire for something he couldn’t put a name to.
But it felt strangely like the moment he had stood in the barn with his pa watching the mare eat, being promised the new foal. A feeling of joy and promise.