When Sheila Arundel's father dies penniless in a New York tenement, she discovers that grief and poverty make uncomfortable bedfellows. Left utterly alone at twenty, she faces a world that offers women few options and less mercy. Then Sylvester Hudson appears, a hotel owner from Millings, a rugged little town in the American West, with an offer that is either salvation or surrender. Sheila accepts, though every mile of train track carries her further from everything she has known. What she finds in Millings is not the escape she imagined, but something harder: the terrifying, exhilarating work of becoming someone new. Katharine Newlin Burt writes with sharp-eyed sympathy about a young woman's passage through loss, showing how the places we flee to often become the places we finally learn to stand still.
