The Woman Who Came Through My Door

The Woman Who Came Through My Door
The Woman Who Came Through My Door t1

PART 1: Fifty Dollars and a Stranger

The first time I understood that my new wife might be dangerous, she was standing in my kitchen with a revolver hidden beneath her skirt and another man calling her name from the other side of my door.

But by then, I had already learned something more unsettling.

Cora was not afraid of me.

Most people were.

Not because I was cruel. I had never considered myself cruel.

I was simply a man who had spent too many winters alone in the mountains, spoken too little, trusted too rarely, and learned that kindness was often another word for debt.

The winter before Cora came nearly killed me.

I had been checking traps along the northern creek when my horse slipped on ice. My left leg caught beneath him before he rolled.

The horse got up.

I did not.

For almost a day I lay beside the frozen creek with snow falling into my collar and my leg twisted beneath me at an angle no leg should ever take.

I dragged myself three miles back to my cabin.

It took until morning.

By spring, the bone had healed crooked enough that cold weather made it ache and long distances required a cane.

That was when I finally admitted something I had refused to admit for years.

A man alone in those mountains was one accident away from becoming a body no one found until thaw.

So I sent fifty dollars to a matrimonial agency in St. Louis.

I felt like a fool doing it.

The letter I sent with the money was not romantic.

I did not know how to be romantic.

I wrote the truth.

My name is Wyatt Mercer. I am thirty-four years old. I own a cabin, forty acres of timber land, and trapping rights along two creeks. I have enough money to feed two people if the harvest is decent and enough stubbornness to survive if it is not.

The mountains are cold.

The work is hard.

The nearest settlement is nearly four hours away in winter.

I do not attend dances.

I do not own a piano.

I do not promise fine dresses.

Anyone afraid of snow, blood, hard labor, silence, or the dark should stay in St. Louis.

I expected no answer.

Three weeks later, a letter arrived.