Sierra's Homecoming. Linda Miller Lael

a brief, dizzying moment, she’d thought there’d been a mistake. That Gabe hadn’t died of the influenza at all, but some stranger instead. Mix-ups like that happened during and after a war, and she hadn’t seen the body, since the coffin was nailed shut.

      She’d stood there beside the road, with that letter in her hand, weeping and trembling so hard that a good quarter of an hour must have passed before she broke the seal and took out the thick fold of vellum pages inside. She’d come to her practical senses by then, but seeing the date at the top of the first page still made her bellow aloud to the empty countryside: March 17, 1918.

      Gabe had still been well when he wrote that letter. He’d been looking forward to coming home. It was about time they added to their family, he’d said, and got cattle running on their part of the Triple M again.

      She’d dropped to her knees, right there on the hard-packed dirt, too stricken to stand. The mule had wandered home, and presently Doss had come looking for her. Found her still clutching that letter to her chest, her throat so raw with sorrow that she couldn’t speak.

      He’d lifted her into his arms, Doss had, without saying a word. Set her on his horse, swung up behind her and taken her home.

      “Hannah?”

      She blinked, came back to the kitchen and the biscuit batter, the package of sausage in her hands.

      Doss was standing beside her, smelling of snow and pine trees and man. He touched her arm.

      “Are you all right?” he asked.

      She swallowed, nodded.

      It was a lie, of course. Hannah hadn’t been all right since the day Gabe went away to war. Like as not, she would never be all right again.

      “You sit down,” Doss said. “I’ll attend to supper.”

      She sat, because the strength had gone out of her knees, and looked around blankly. “Where’s Tobias?”

      Doss washed his hands, opened the sausage packet, and dumped the contents into the big cast iron skillet waiting on the stove. “Upstairs,” he answered.

      Tobias had left the room without her knowing?

      “Oh,” she said, unnerved. Was she losing her mind? Had her sorrow pushed her not only to absent-minded distraction, but beyond the boundaries of ordinary sanity as well?

      She considered the mysterious movement of her mother-in-law’s teapot.

      Adeptly, Doss rolled out the biscuit dough, cut it into circles with the rim of a glass. Lorelei McKettrick had taught her boys to cook, sew on their own buttons and make up their beds in the morning. You could say that for her, and a lot of other things, too.

      Doss poured Hannah a mug of coffee, brought it to her. Started to rest a hand on her shoulder, then thought better of it and pulled back. “I know it’s hard,” he said.

      Hannah couldn’t look at him. Her eyes burned with tears she didn’t want him to see, though she reckoned he knew they were there anyhow. “There are days,” she said, in a whisper, “when I don’t think I can go another step. But I have to, because of Tobias.”

      Doss crouched next to Hannah’s chair, took both her hands in his own and looked up into her face. “There’s been a hundred times,” he said, “when I wished it was me in that grave up there on the hill, instead of Gabe. I’d give anything to take his place, so he could be here with you and the boy.”

      A sense of loss cut into Hannah’s spirit like the blade of a new ax, swung hard. “You mustn’t think things like that,” she said, when she caught her breath. She pulled her hands free, laid them on either side of his earnest, handsome face, then quickly withdrew them. “You mustn’t, Doss. It isn’t right.”

      Just then Tobias clattered down the back stairs.

      Doss flushed and got to his feet.

      Hannah turned away, pretended to have an interest in the mail, most of which was for Holt and Lorelei, and would have to be forwarded to San Antonio.

      “What’s the matter, Ma?” Tobias spoke worriedly into the awkward silence. “Don’t you feel good?”

      She’d hoped the boy hadn’t seen Doss sitting on his haunches beside her chair, but obviously he had.

      “I’m fine,” she said briskly. “I just had a splinter in my finger, that’s all. I got it putting wood in the fire, and Doss took it out for me.”

      Tobias looked from her to his uncle and back again.

      “Is that why you’re making supper?” he asked Doss.

      Doss hesitated. Like Gabe, he’d been raised to abhor any kind of lie, even an innocent one, designed to soothe a boy who’d lost his father and feared, in the depths of his dreams, losing his mother, too.

      “I’m making supper,” he said evenly, “because I can.”

      Hannah closed her eyes, opened them again.

      “Set the table, please,” Doss told Tobias.

      Tobias hurried to the cabinet for plates and silverware.

      Hannah met Doss’s gaze across the dimly lit room.

      A charge seemed to pass between them, like before, when Hannah had come back from getting the mail and found Tobias outside, in the teeth of a high-country winter, building a snow fort.

      “It’s too damn dark in this house,” Doss said. He walked to the middle of the room, reached up, and pulled the beaded metal cord on the overhead light. The bare bulb glowed so brightly it made Hannah blink, but she didn’t object.

      Something in Doss’s face prevented her from it.

      Present Day

      Travis had long since finished his coffee and left the house by the time Liam got up from his nap and came downstairs, tousle-haired and puffy-eyed from sleep.

      “That boy was in my room again,” he said. “He was sitting at the desk, writing a letter. Can I watch TV? There’s a nice HD setup in that room next to the front door. A computer, too, with a big, flat-screen monitor.”

      Sierra knew about the fancy electronics, since she’d explored the house after Travis left. “You can watch TV for an hour,” she said. “Hands off the computer, though. It doesn’t belong to us.”

      Liam’s shoulders slumped slightly. “I know how to use a computer, Mom,” he said. “We had them at school.”

      Between rent, food and medical bills, Sierra had never been able to scrape together the money for a PC of their own. She’d used the one in the office of the bar she worked in, back in Florida. That was how Meg had first contacted her. “We’ll get one,” she said, “as soon as I find another job.”

      “My mailbox is probably full,” Liam replied, unappeased. “All the kids in the Geek Program were going to write to me.”

      Sierra, in the midst of putting a package of frozen chicken breasts into the microwave to thaw, felt as though she’d been poked with a sharp stick. “Don’t call it the Geek Program, please,” she said.

      Liam shrugged one shoulder. “Everybody else does.”

      “Go watch TV.”

      He went.

      A rap sounded at the back door, and Sierra peered through the glass, since it was dark out, to see Travis standing on the back porch.

      “Come in,” she called, and headed for the sink to wash her hands.

      Travis entered, carrying a fragrant bag of take-out food in one hand. The collar of his coat was raised against the cold, his hat brim pulled low over his eyes.

      “Fried chicken,” he said, lifting the bag as evidence.

      Sierra paused, shut off the faucet, dried