“SILAS!”
I set my battered canvas bag beside the staircase.
“He can tell me to leave himself.”
That was how I met Everett Caldwell.
But the truth was, by then I had been told to leave places in a hundred different ways.
Sometimes with words.
Sometimes with a look.
Sometimes by people who smiled politely while making certain I understood that a woman like me did not belong at their table, in their parlor, or anywhere near their sons.
I was twenty-nine years old when I arrived in Red Hollow in July of 1884 with two dollars and forty cents in my pocket.
That was the full accounting of my fortune.
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