Lou could see a lone rider approaching the main house and wondered who could be in such a hurry on such a fine morning. Balancing the baby on her hip, she started down the steps to greet the horse and rider. Nearly fainting when she recognized the familiar blonde hair and worn buckskins, she recovered quickly enough to storm back up the stairs and grab hold of the door before Cody called to her.

“Lou, wait!”

Wheeling around, she pointed to her old friend and Cody was sure he could feel her pushing him back into his saddle. “William F. Cody! If my fool-headed husband thinks he can send you, as a messenger boy, and it will all be fixed then he has another thing coming! You can just ride back out of here and send word that I’ll be home when I’m good and ready and he had best be elsewhere!”

Slowly climbing down from his horse, Cody started up the stairs.

“I mean it, Cody. This ain’t none of your business.”

“Lou, I wish I could say I knew what you were yammering about, but I don’t. I didn’t come from Sweetwater. I’ve been here in Denver and Abilene before that. I’m here to bring you a telegram.”

Lou was unnerved by the intense look in the eyes of a man who was well known for his jokes and lack of seriousness. “Who’s it from?” she asked tentatively.

Reaching to take Madeline from her arms, he handed her the message. “Is this my new niece? She’s beautiful, Lou. Looks just like you.” Looking up from the smiling face of the baby, he noticed she hadn’t unfolded the paper, but was turning it over and over in her hands.

“It’s from Jimmy, Lou.”

Lou knew it was bad news. There was no other reason that Jimmy would have gone to the trouble of locating Cody to deliver her the telegram. They had all agreed long ago that bad news was easier to swallow when it came from those you knew.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“You need to, sweetheart,” he whispered back.

She had tears in her eyes before she smoothed away the first crease. She knew it had to do with Kid. Had it been Mary Emma, Sarah or anyone else in the family, he would have come to Denver himself. Just his absence proved that something was terribly wrong.

The sickening wail that Lou let fall from her lips was a sound that Cody wished he could say he had never heard before, but he had. One night, over seven years ago, when Kid left Lou on her knees, in the rain, as he rode away from her. This time it was too much for him to bear. He pulled her to his chest with one arm, Maddy cradled in the other. “Lou, you need to stay calm. You hear me? This is no time to fall apart. He’s alive Lou, but he’s hurt and he needs you. So we don’t have any time for wastin’. We got a train to catch. Can you go get your things for me?”

Lou didn’t make any effort to move, but took her baby back from Cody, nearly crushing her in an embrace. “This is all my fault,” she cried as she rocked. “They told me not to leave. They said I should stay and work it out, but no. I had to be as stubborn as a billy goat and storm off to Denver. I did this to him!”

Cody had no idea what Lou was talking about and was grateful when Shannon, Fallon and the rest of the Malone clan arrived en mass.

“Who are you, son!” Liam Malone demanded, his gun drawn and pointed at Cody. “And what did you do to Louise?”

“I’m Lou’s friend, sir. William F. Cody. We rode for the Express together.”

“Well, if you’re a friend Mr. Cody, then why is she hysterical right now?” Fallon was holding Lou and trying to make out her incoherent sobs.

Trying to ignore the gun pointed at his chest as well as Connor’s hand itching to draw his own weapon, Cody turned to the redheaded woman soothing Lou. “I had to bring her some bad news, Miss. There’s been an accident.”

Lou separated herself from Fallon’s embrace and spoke in a hollow, empty sounding voice. “It’s my fault. I did this to him. I need to go home now.”

Shannon Malone eyed Lou cautiously, clearly seeing the signs of shock. “Mr. Cody, ‘tis kind of you to come all this way in person, but I don’t think Louise is fit to travel right now.”

“Mrs. Malone, I appreciate your lookin’ after Lou and I knew she wouldn’t take this well, but then again, neither did I. But I’m ready to go and it’s imperative that we leave on the three o’clock train today. Her other daughters are cryin’ for her and her husband needs her.” Cody looked at Lou’s pale face and tear-swollen eyes, but finished his thought anyway. “I fear he’ll die without her.”

Lou put herself through the motions of preparing for the return trip to Sweetwater. Things strewn across the bed and stacked on the bureau, she found it hard to concentrate on the task at hand and had taken to staring out the window.

She heard Fallon knock before entering. She knew it would be her friend coming to check on her progress, but she didn’t bother to turn around. Keeping her back to the door and looking out the window that faced the back of the house she kept her face raised to the sun. She did not feel the warmth. She only wanted to burn away the fear. “I can’t lose him, Fallon. I can’t bury someone else I love.”

Fallow knew that Lou was looking out over her brother’s grave and reliving the horror and pain of watching Flynn die too many years before his time.

“How can I be such a horrible person? How could I run out on him like I did? Why, I really am a hypocrite. I did exactly what he did to me all those years ago. Only he came right back and I didn’t.”

Moving to join Lou at the window, Fallon wrapped her arms around Lou and hugged her from behind. “Louise, you are far from a horrible person and I don’t believe Kid thinks you are either. I highly doubt he’ll hold you responsible for an act of God, and that’s what it was. Mr. Cody said it was a storm that started it all.”

“It was God getting back at me for being so horrible to Kid, for being so callous as to toss our life together out like dirty bathwater.” Lou let the curtain drop back into place and obscure her view of Flynn’s grave. “You would think that I, of all people, would have learned my lesson about being so careless with people I love.”

“Louise, stop it this instant! I will not allow you to wallow in pity. You have to pull yourself together and go home to your family and help Kid get well. I know that once you’re by his side, he’ll come awake at once.”

Lou closed her eyes and tried to picture happier times. Times like the picnics she and Kid took the girls on, the baseball lessons at the ranch, their private trips to the swimming hole, but all she could see was Kid, lying motionless and pale, waiting for her to come home.

“I fear I’ve done permanent damage to our marriage, Fallon. I let my anger over the child cloud my vision and no matter how much he wanted to explain, I refused to listen.” Lou turned to her friend and Fallon was positive she could see a faint sparkle in her eye. It was as if the real Louise McCloud was fighting to rise from the ashes. It looked as if the strong, confident woman Fallon knew Louise was would be the one going home to face the secrets and make her family whole again.

Lou could sense the change coming over her. Her heart was racing and the fight she felt building inside of her invigorated her. “I swear to you, Fallon. If he makes it through this, I’ll make it right. I will do what ever it takes to make him forgive me.”

“It’s not a matter of forgiveness, Louise. It’s more a matter of trust. You will need to learn to trust one another again. If you really think about it, you’re at even - one big secret apiece. Maybe that’ll be enough?” Fallon arched her eyebrow in jest.

Despite the jumble of emotions running through her body, Lou felt her face turning into a small smile. “Gosh, I hope so. I really do. You know, Flynn was right. He said I’d find someone to love like he loved me and I did. It’s Kid. It’s always been Kid and I’m so scared I’ll lose him now.”

“Don’t say that, Louise. One minute ago I saw the old you bursting to push through and here you are sliding back down again. You can’t do that. You need to be strong. You need to fight! It’s okay to be scared. However, you can’t be weak.”

Lou inhaled deeply and let her breath out slowly. She was trying to absorb Fallon’s energy and conviction. “I’ll be strong. I’ll promise you and myself that.”

“Good. Now what do you plan to do about the boy?”

Lou pondered the question as she returned to packing her and Maddy’s things. “I’d like to say nothing, but I know that’s not the solution and I know now how wrong that would be. The boy, I mean Jackson,” Lou corrected herself. “He didn’t do anything wrong. How can I punish an innocent child for the mistakes of his parents? At the same time, how can I punish the parents? I don’t know who the mother is.” Although she had her suspicions. “And Kid. He must have been so young when it happened. He only turned twenty-seven this winter and Jackson’s got to be nearin’ twelve.”

“You’re right, Louise. It’s something that happened many years before Kid knew you, before he knew he’d love you. And Jackson is an innocent here. We’ve already talked about this, there’s got to be a reason he ended up on your doorstep now. You’re just going to have to see where this all takes you.”

“I wish you could come back with me. I’m going to need your strength.”

“Honey, you’ve got plenty of strength on your own and if Mr. Cody is just one of the examples of the family that is waiting for you in Sweetwater, then I know you’ll be in good hands. You’re gonna be okay and so is Kid. Now, we’d best get you to the station.”

The return journey to Ft. Collins passed surprisingly quickly and although Lou couldn’t concentrate on one thing for too long, Cody did his best to keep her occupied with his antics with the baby and a never-ending card game. If they kept playing all the way to Sweetwater, Cody would be in debt to Lou for the rest of his life.

The hours when the baby slept afforded Lou and Cody time to catch-up and reminisce, as well as discuss the situation that now had them racing against time towards the place where it all started so long ago. Lou was surprised by Cody’s perspective and it was obvious that he had done a lot of maturing since their riding days.

During the night, when sleep refused to come, Lou watched Cody resting with Madeline and allowed her mind to replay her earlier conversations with Cody. It had been difficult for her to tell Cody about her husband’s indiscretion and he gently reminded her that the Kid didn’t have a love affair or do anything directly to her. His liaison with Jackson’s mother had occurred years before the Kid ever set foot in Sweetwater, Nebraska Territory.

“He didn’t do it to hurt you, Lou. Just like you didn’t get married to Flynn to hurt him,” he’d said. “You both had lives before you met each other. It’s what you did from that day forward, what you’ve done together that counts.”

It was Cody’s advice about Jackson that Lou most valued.

“Cody, the hardest part of all of this is that he looks so much like the Kid. He’s the mirror image of him. He looks like what I imagined our son would look like.”

“See, Lou. You can’t think of it like that. You can’t think of what might be down the road. The hard truth is Jackson’s there. He’s at your ranch and he has to be dealt with. Now, you can go on and ignore him or treat him lesser than you treat your own children, but all that’s gonna do is put a strain on you and Kid and make things worse. If you can open yourself to the boy, maybe treat him like your own, you may find you grow to love him like an equal.”

Lou could only sit wide-eyed as Cody continued.

“I think you also need to remember how hard you and Kid had it while growin’ up. It was running away from those childhoods that brought you both to the Express, and each other, in the first place. Do you really want to put another child through that?”

The words rang through Lou’s ears long into the night. It surprised her that Cody could take something that had been troubling her for over a week and put it so simply and be so right about it. She and Kid had vowed not to make the same mistakes as their parents and up until that moment they had been successful, but now here she was ready to push Jackson away, or worse. She knew she couldn’t do that. She knew she wouldn’t do that.

Still awake as the sun broke over the horizon, Lou watched the morning light fill the land with warmth and new hope. This time, when she turned her face to the sun she tried to absorb its strength. She knew she would need it.

Chapter Ten