Page 51 of The Widow and the Wanted

Boone huffs softly. “See?”

Then, slow as a thought changing its mind, it drifts up and to the left.

G →

I wet the tip of my pencil and write it down. The stove clicks and candles flicker as the penny moves slowly from letter to letter.

E →

M →

I →

N →

I →

The penny stops and my blood chills. “That isn’t funny.”

“What ain’t funny?” Boone asks, his grin slipping.

Okee glances down at the page. “Gemini,” he reads, with no particular alarm.

Boone squints at the letters. “Huh. I’m flattered you think I could spell that, but that must’a been your doin’.”

That is all the notice either of them gives it, and for some reason that makes it worse. To them it is only a word. A notion of twinned things, of pairs. To me it is a place. An address heavy with memories, not all of them kind.

Mother moved west and founded another—a new Gemini in Fort Gibson, near enough to our route that I had considered a visit, though I had not yet decided if I could bear it.

Boone asked where we are headed after all this, meaning the road, the next camp, whatever rough future waits for the three of us before we return to our lives. But the board did not answer him. It answered me.

I pull my hand back from the penny as if it has turned hot. Yet even as I do, a worse thought comes creeping in after the first: what if no spirit moved it at all? What if I had done it myself, some buried piece of me nudging the thing toward what I was too cowardly to look at in daylight? As if my heart has taken this opportunity to push me toward a decision while my mind is numbed with drink.

I pick up the page, tuck it into my notebook, then run my thumb once along the spine. I clear my throat. “I think that’s enough amusement for now.”

Okee nods, as if he’s been waiting for someone to say it.

Boone tilts his head. “You sure?”

“Yes.” I smile, easy, the way you do when you mean to end a conversation without souring it. I stand, gathering my notebook to my chest. The room feels warmer than it did a moment ago, or perhaps I’ve only noticed it now.

I cross the cabin in quick steps, skirts brushing the boards, and grasp the ladder rungs.

Sleep does not come easy.

The wind pushes at the cabin all night, and I lie awake, Gemini sitting behind my eyes no matter how I turn.

Why that word? Twins. Pairs. Something so simple, and yet strange that Boone and Okee carried the constellation with them for their own reasons. Two halves of something I do not fully understand.

I tell myself that it is a coincidence. It must be. A word is only a word, and men are only men, and I have had too much whiskey and too little sleep.

The penny moved because we pushed it, because Boone wanted a laugh, because I had already been thinking of Fort Gibson and would not admit it.

Still, I do not sleep until near morning. When I finally wake, the sun is high and bright. Boone and Okee are gone, probably making their rounds. The ache of the whiskey rattling in my head settles last night’s fright. I must have pushed that penny myself.

The wind howls outside the cabin all morning, rattling the shutters and pushing cold through every crack it can find. I tidy to keep from listening to it—sweep grit from the floorboards, shake out the blankets, set the few tins and crockery in their proper places. The room is stale from keeping the cold out, so I set a pot on to simmer with dried persimmons and cloves, melting down a few handfuls of snow for water.

I sweep upstairs, and from the loft I can see the lean-to, if I step to the little gap between rafters and wall. Boone and Okee are out there with the horse, hunched against the weather.