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cold?” Bel thrust her chin at her father. As she did so, Johnny Mulcane appeared, humped in his coat, the pistol dangling from his fist. His red face belied nothing of his actions the night before.
    â€œJohnny—” she pleaded, not wanting to reveal her mother’s part in this. The man ignored her, looking instead at her father.
    â€œSir?”
    â€œIsabel Prinz, you will go in the house right now,” Daniel roared.
    Instead of obeying him, Bel skirted past and into the interior of the coach barn. Beyond the carriages loomed the darker cages of the empty coaches. They smelled of leather and wood: the one with the red satin pillows that Faustina loved, the one with the buffalo robe that her father had bought when he was in the West, and the delicate white surrey that Lucia had already requested for her still-nonexistent wedding.
    â€œFriend of a friend,” Bel whispered softly, heading toward the ladder to the hayloft. The worn wooden rungs extended through an open trapdoor. Sun from the upper window illuminated a thousand dust motes drifting slowly down.
    â€œIsabel!” she heard her father cry. She scampered up the splintered rungs, nearly tripping in her skirt. The wood was so cold, it burned her fingers.
    â€œFriend of a friend,” she called again, and the runaway’s burlap hat appeared above the trapdoor, its shadow shrouding his eyes. “Please come down. I know I can get my father to let you go free,” she promised in her gentlest tone. He didn’t move. She repeated her request, staying as still as she could, remembering what her grandmother had taught her about feeding wild birds. You must become a stone , her grandmother had said. You must become a tree, a reason for them to trust you .
    â€œJohnny, come here,” her father barked. “I see him.” There was a loud crack as Johnny crashed into the white surrey, snapping one of the thin wooden hitches.
    At the noise, the runaway retreated. What is a stone to a bird but a place to land? her grandmother used to utter like a prayer, making Bel repeat it silently while she waited for the sparrows to find the food in her palm. What is a tree but a home? But it wasn’t just her. It was what she stood for—it was the two men charging in behind her, and the leathery quiet of the carriages, and Greenwood beyond, a house too grand for its few occupants, and the gun in Johnny Mulcane’s hand. The runaway would not look down at her again, like the sparrows who used to guess her deception and fly away with a throat-caught sound.
    Her father moved closer, but she could only smell Johnny, rancid and musty at once. She heard the rustle of his boots across the frost-buckled earth. Keep climbing, she ordered herself. He’s coming. Her body froze in place, stuck like a wheel in the snow. She wished desperately for Laurence’s courage. If he were here, he would think of something, but she didn’t know what to do.
    â€œDon’t,” she said feebly, clinging to the rungs as her father reached up to peel her from them. The ladder swayed dangerously.
    â€œLet go, Isbael,” her father commanded, pulling her hands apart. One by one, her fingers tore from the wood. “Let go.”
    When she finally did, she sagged against her father’s chest, allowing even the bones to melt inside her body. In her mind, she would see the rest of that morning like a story her mother read at night, narrated with all the bright details an author can muster when talking about tragedy and what shouldn’t happen but always does: Mary’s cold, scratchy sleeves dragging her inside Greenwood to watch behind the starched lace of the windows, which did not muffle but somehow compounded the single shot and the thump of a man falling to his knees, a man used to running when he could run, and perhaps killing if he had to, who knew there was no hope for him now, even on this white, frozen brink of freedom. He