He spent six days grieving the mail-order bride he’d never met—then she stepped off the train alive, carrying the proof that the telegram had buried the wrong woman.

Chapter 2

“Car four,” she said, out loud on her knees in the station dust, with the paper open between them. “There was a fire in car four.”

She said it with a clarity that he would remember for years afterward — the exact, unadorned precision of a person giving a report she has already given herself many times, standing in a cold station yard in Kansas, watching a lamp burn a curtain twenty minutes from a misread name.

“I was in car seven.” She touched the bandage on her forearm, once, the way a person touches a bruise she has already accounted for. “There was a woman named Cora Hall who was not in any car but the one that burned. Someone made an error on the manifest in all that smoke and shouting, and the name that reached Denver wore mine.”