"And if I don't?"
"Then you stay in a mess that isn't yours by birth."
Evelyn looked at the letter again, at the silver wax, at the careful cursive that had felt like a door. "It became mine the moment I stepped off that train believing it."
They moved again, slower now that the immediate chase had bent away, but not slow enough to invite conversation that would steal breath they needed for climbing. Evelyn's suitcase knocked against her calf. Once she stumbled and Thomas caught her forearm; once he slipped on black ice under powder and she steadied him with a hand on his duster, a brief symmetry neither of them commented on. The mountains did not care about symmetry. They cared about weather and gravity and whether a person kept walking.
Near a stand of aspens stripped to bone-white trunks, Thomas stopped and pointed to a faint path. "Trappers used this before the railroad. It comes in behind the livery. If the riders took Main, we take the back."
Evelyn leaned on her knees and caught her breath. Snow had found its way into the tops of the red boots. Her hat feathers were damp and ridiculous. She laughed once, sharply, because the alternative was tears that would freeze.
"You've done this before," she said.
"I've imagined doing this before," he said. "Imagination is cheaper than dying. Today we spend it."
"If we reach town," Evelyn said, "I will require coffee and a sentence that is not a proposal."
"I can manage coffee," Thomas said. "Sentences we'll negotiate."
Galena Crossing sat in a fold of the mountains like a sentence someone had started and not finished. Main Street was mud under a skin of ice. Boardwalks ran uneven. A false-front mercantile. A telegraph office with a window fogged from the inside. A sheriff's office that needed paint. A lodging house called the Pine Bench with a sign that listed rates in a hand that had given up on flourish. Smoke lifted from chimneys and shredded in the wind. Somewhere a dog barked at nothing and then at them.
They came in behind the livery as planned. A boy stacking hay watched Evelyn's dress the way boys watch fireworks—interested, unsure whether to cheer. Thomas tossed him a coin for silence that would last an hour at most. Silence in a town this size was a rental, never a purchase.
Thomas took her in through the side door of the Pine Bench and spoke three quiet sentences to a woman named Mrs. Orth, gray-haired, spectacles, apron dusted with flour. Rooms were paid in coin Thomas produced from an inside pocket. Evelyn's suitcase went upstairs. Evelyn's hat feathers looked absurd and brave in the narrow hall.
"You'll want dry stockings," Mrs. Orth said, not unkindly. "And a story that doesn't begin with running."