The boy obeyed. His small hands locked around the saddle horn of the black gelding, the steady horse doing the carrying with Peter up in front of the rider and her arms around him.Behind the gelding, on a lead rope, came the second horse: a tall bay stallion with a white blaze and a Bennett brand on his hip, tossing his head at every sound on Dryfork Main Street.The whole town saw them come in.Men stopped outside the feed store. The blacksmith stepped from his forge, hammer in hand. The gelding walked straight down the dusty street, mud to his hocks, and the woman who rode him sat tall through all of it—soaked to the waist, skirt dark as ink, one sleeve torn, hat gone, fair hair half loose down her back.She looked less like a bride arriving than a story walking out of an old book.At the hitching rail by the church stood a man in a clean shirt, hat in his hands, a much-folded letter in his shirt pocket, where he had stood every Saturday for 11 weeks. Isaac Bennett had waited through a wet spring, three letters that never came, and a silence that had begun to feel like an answer. Edwin Crowe had said a woman who meant to come would have come by now.Isaac saw the boy first. The color left his face. "Peter!"The boy lifted one hand, remembered his orders, and put it straight back. "Pa, she told me not to let go till the horse stops."The gelding stopped.The woman swung down into the mud, lifted Peter after her, and set him on his feet like a feed sack. Only then did she face the man she had crossed half a country to marry: Isaac Bennett."Your son was waist-deep in Miller's Creek with a slipped saddle and a scared stallion ready to run him under. He is cold, he is bruised, and he is brave. Get a blanket around him first. There will be time after for everything else."Isaac wrapped his son in his own coat with shaking hands and looked at her the way a man looks at rain after a long dry season. "Willa Sorenson. You came.""Yes," she said, and wrung creek water from her sleeve onto Main Street. "Sorry for the state of the arrival."It had started five months earlier with a letter written at a kitchen table in Minnesota and a man in Colorado reading it by lamplight with nobody left in his house to read it aloud to.Isaac Bennett had gone looking for a wife the way a drowning man looks for the bank. His wife Bethany had been gone two winters. Fever took her in four days, with snow at the windows and Doc Albright riding out twice through the dark. Isaac buried her on the rise behind the house among the cottonwoods and went on.