Dark Soil

It is 1863, and Vera Marsh has buried her traveling companion at a fort on the Platte River, three days into a journey she cannot abandon.She has a wagon, a team, forty dollars, and a land claim in the Willamette Valley that belonged to her husband before he died. What she does not have is a company willing to take on a widow traveling alone - until Silas Harlan does.What follows is two thousand miles of the hardest country on the continent. River crossings that cannot be undone. Decisions made without the luxury of certainty. People who become, against all expectation, something like family.Vera Marsh is a practical woman. She knows how to keep accounts, drive a team, and manage grief without letting it show. What she is less certain of is everything she left behind when she buried her husband - the faith that once steadied her, the sense that the ground beneath her feet meant something beyond the miles it demanded.The Oregon Trail does not offer answers. But it offers the kind of company, and the kind of country, that makes certain questions harder to avoid.Dark Soil is a novel about endurance, community, and the slow, reluctant return of hope.