A Time to Mourn

Sweetwater, Nebraska Territory, August 1865

The place looked exactly like she felt. Worn-down, lifeless, broken in a hundred ways and places.

In her darkest imaginings, she'd never thought her homecoming would feel this way. For years, the thought of this place was the only thing that made hope flare in her heart. It was their dream, this place where their past was rooted, where they had found happiness and each other. It had never occurred to her, even while the world was crumbling and falling away beneath her feet, that this place too would have been touched by the tempest that had soaked their world in blood for four years.

Her bitterness at her own naivety lay on her tongue like the dust on the sun-scorched yard. High above her in the cloudless sky, the windmill turned listlessly on some breeze that could not be felt below, metal screeching on metal.

"What the hell am I supposed to do now?" she asked, voice startling her horse, and looked to her right.

He, of course, was not there to answer her.

She knew that to the center of her soul, but still it always jarred her to realize it, her heart breaking anew a thousand times a day whenever she parted her lips to tell him whatever thought crossed her mind. She talked to him still, when she talked at all, wondered if that made her crazy, then decided it didn't matter.

Almost nothing mattered to her now.

Here was their hard-won future and she found she didn't want it anymore. He had been her dream first and foremost, and all this was secondary and no consolation to her at all. But she had made a promise in the moments when she would have promised him anything to make his passing easier. Now she resented the hell out of it, and maybe him too a little bit for making her give her word.

Nevertheless, she was bound to it, and to this place, and to this life as surely as she had been bound to him.

She urged her horse forward, his horse following quietly on the lead at her side on the last full measure of their journey to begin life without him.