They Said No Woman Would Wed the Scarred Blacksmith — Then His Mail-Order Bride Arrived

Chapter 4

Sadie sat on the attic floor for a long time, holding the two horseshoes in her hands—the one from the trunk and the one she had taken from Eli’s workshop after he died, the one he had kept on his workbench for fifty years.

She had not known about Margaret’s brother. She had not known about the letters, the tongs, the photograph. She had not known that the woman who had married the scarred blacksmith of Cedar Hollow had been carrying a ghost across the continent, looking for a place to lay him down.

But she understood now.

She understood why Margaret had never flinched at Eli’s face. She understood why she had crossed that boardwalk without hesitation. She understood why she had defended him in the street against Tom Akerly, why she had held his hand at the wedding, why she had pressed her palm against the burned side of his face and held it there until he stopped trembling.

Margaret had been loving her brother through Eli. She had been answering a question that had gone unanswered for seventeen years. She had been giving a dead boy the only gift she had left to give: proof that a man with scars on his skin could be loved. Proof that the marks did not change what was underneath. Proof that someone would look at a ruined face and see something worth keeping.

And in the process, she had actually fallen in love with Eli Brennan. Not because he reminded her of her brother. Not because she was trying to heal an old wound. But because he was kind, and honest, and brave, and because he had looked at her—a widow with nothing to her name but a gray traveling dress and a trunk full of grief—and decided she was worth keeping, too.

—

The funeral for Thomas Sullivan had been held on a rainy Tuesday in October of 1882.

Margaret had been nineteen years old, and she had stood at the edge of the grave in a black dress that smelled of mothballs and watched them lower her brother’s coffin into the ground. The minister had said words she did not remember. The other apprentices from the ironworks had stood in a damp cluster, looking uncomfortable in their Sunday clothes. No one had said very much, because no one had known what to say.

The boy had died in a charity hospital, three days after the fire, and the cause of death had been listed as “complications from burns sustained in an industrial accident.” The official record took four lines. It did not mention that he had been trying to save another boy, a younger apprentice who had been trapped behind a fallen beam. It did not mention that he had succeeded—that the younger boy had walked out of that hospital a week later with nothing worse than a broken arm and a story he would tell for the rest of his life.

It did not mention that Thomas Sullivan had spent his last three days asking, over and over, if anyone would ever want him now, with his hands destroyed, with his face marked, with the only thing he had ever been good at taken from him forever.

The burns had not killed him. The infection had. But Margaret had always believed, in the darkest corner of her heart, that it was the question that had done the real damage. The question no one had been able to answer.

She had stood at his grave in the rain, and she had made a promise she did not know how to keep.

*I will find a way to answer you. I will find a way to prove that you were wrong.*

She had kept that promise on a Thursday afternoon in the autumn of 1889, when she stepped off a stagecoach in Cedar Hollow, Montana, and pressed a worn iron horseshoe into the palm of a scarred blacksmith who had asked the same question her brother had asked, eleven years later, three thousand miles away.

*Can someone love a man with a ruined face?*

She had answered it with her hand, with her eyes, with her refusal to look away.