The Enforcer's Quiet Wife

I clean up what the family leaves behind. I've been doing it for four years. I don't ask and I don't remember. Then I walked into a barn outside Lubbock and saw the body of a man I grew up with, and every rule I had stopped working. By morning I was married. Filed. On paper. To the family's enforcer, a man with a quiet voice and quieter hands who needed a wife to inherit land his father left him. We made a deal. One year. His name. My silence. Neither of us touching the other. I found the ledger his father hid. I found the men who killed my friend. I found Lon in the foreman's cabin during the first snow, and we stopped keeping every promise except one. The family votes next week. My name is on the agenda. So is his uncle's. Only one of us is walking into that room with something to say.