Scorched Earth

Michael is twenty-eight. He has a workshop, a woman who stayed, and a small son named for the man he shot. The coast has forgiven him more than he has forgiven himself, and the second ledger has sat on the shelf above his bench for a year, unopened.On another coast, years before any of this, a girl of twenty-one keeps her father’s accounts in a small book. Her name is Elizabeth. She is good with numbers and better with people, and she has not yet done the first thing she cannot undo.Their two lives run toward each other across a lifetime. This is how a merchant’s daughter became the woman whose names filled a ledger, and what her son decides to do with what she left him.The closing volume of the Falling Stars trilogy.**Cover art: Harvest (1905) by Maxfield Parrish; in the public domain**