The sky was still. La Conquistadora knew better.

Sophie Louisa Degarrin, named quite properly for a grandmother and her own mother, woke on a May morning in 1946 to the smell of coffee and bacon drifting through the thick adobe walls of Casa Blanca. For a moment she lay still. She was home. After a whole year in Virginia, she was home, and through the open window the New Mexico sky was already that high, clean, heartbreaking blue that she had missed every single day she’d been gone.

Her room was exactly as she’d left it, but a year away made everything visible again: the child’s lariat coiled on its hook by the door, the faded ribbon from a barrel race she’d won at thirteen on a horse that had since gone to pasture, and on the windowsill the jar of arrowheads she’d spent whole summers collecting across the mesas, chipped from flint by Comanche and Kiowa hunters who had tracked buffalo over this same land centuries before anyone called it La Conquistadora. Things she’d stopped seeing long before she left. She saw them now.

A letter lay on her bureau, propped against the mirror. She recognized the handwriting, a boy from a spring dance in Lexington, pleasant enough, forgettable. The envelope had been opened. Sophie pulled the page out and scanned it. Something about hoping she’d had a safe journey, hoping she’d write, hoping to see her again in the fall. A lot of hoping.