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pot. “Smoke some, make stew with the rest. This house is bigger than you’d think. There’s another room behind the fireplace.”
    Melody ducked through the small doorway to see into the hidden room. At the moment it was full of burlap bags of potatoes and flour, but she imagined he built it with family in mind.
    “Jimmy said Mr. Baywood was expecting his family,” Melody said, setting down the bucket. The log cabin was small but well made, almost no drafts coming through the timber of the walls. The chinking looked new. The stone fireplace was large with a wide hearth. The table and chairs were sturdy, made from the pine trees surrounding the place. There was food hanging from burlap bags and the air smelled of mud and fire and whatever plants were hung by strings from the rafters to dry.
    If Mr. Baywood didn’t survive, his murderer would make this her home. The thought made her nauseous and she pressed a hand to her belly. She’d done some truly reprehensible things in her life and paid for them in blood and grief. But taking the home of a man her husband had killed...
    What did I do to deserve this?
She wondered.
Or worse, what will be asked of me to pay for it?
    Before the war she’d craved attention and status. Reveled in her position of prestige, enjoyed the envy of other girls and the attention of all the men. She’d been selfish and conniving to serve her own goals. But for all of that, she’d had a dream that kept her alive through the war—of a family, of a husband and children, of work that would bind them together. A fine legacy built and cared for with her own two hands. A home.
    She had schemed to win Christopher, a man she'd thought would best make real that dream. Mama had told her that Christopher was too weak to match her, that he would wander or feel bullied, and part of her knew that Mama was right. But she'd thought she could control him. And that it would make her happy.
    And she believed, with all that was left of her heart, that the cost of her hubris had been the destruction of her dreams. The war had taught her that every moment of happiness, no matter how slight, how meager and threadbare, would be paid for with an equal measure of sorrow. With despair.
    And that the surest way to bring destruction upon the things she wanted was to want them in the first place.
    Her dreams had not survived her dreaming them; they’d been broken and repaired, only to be smashed again and again. Each aspect compromised over and over. She’d wanted fine gowns, and instead had threadbare rags. She’d won Christopher, only to have him die in the first year of the war, and instead she got Jimmy, his younger, lesser brother, one of the few boys to come home at all.
    Despite Annie and Melody's efforts, without the slaves the cotton fields went to seed, and then the hay pastures, until all that was left were the kitchen garden and the fruit trees, which she was barely able to keep alive, while Annie tried to hunt whatever game still lived in the forests around their land.
    Most of the animals were taken by soldiers on both sides, until she and Annie learned how to hide them better when the armies marched past. Jacks, Lilly, and Rue were the only horses left from Father's fine stable.
    The home she craved sold off to a man who would not ever love it as she had. Not ever.
    Before the war, when she'd been vying for Christopher's attention, she'd wanted romance. Passion. Stolen kisses. Rushed, panting caresses.
    But all of that had been beaten and raped out of her.
    Her dream was utterly unrecognizable to her now. She looked at those broken pieces and didn't know what she wanted.
    To eat until she was full? To have enough food so her sister’s stomach didn’t growl at night?
    To wake up in the morning without fear?
    She'd married the wrong man for all of that.
    But worse, perhaps she was the wrong woman for all of that. A soul not meant for dreaming and unable to hold onto happiness.
    “How do we get him to the