He relived every word they’d said to each other a hundred times. He thought of the way she’d felt, the way she kissed him, the way she jumped into his arms that first meeting as if she were his. He remembered her letters, realizing he no longer had to look at them because he knew every word. She’d talked of her dream of starting a school someday, and she’d talked of how she thought of him, but she never talked about herself. He spent hours thinking of what he’d say to her when they met. Assuming she was there and hadn’t moved on. For all he knew she’d borrowed someone else’s horse and ridden farther south. Texas was big enough that she could disappear, and he’d never see her again. No, he corrected, they would meet again. She’d been in Austin when she’d written the last letter, and if she was there, he’d find her. Austin couldn’t have more than a thousand people. Over two hundred of those were slaves, then well over half of the others would be men. Eliminating children, that left only a few hundred women to sort through to find a woman whose name started with R.
