Montana Territory, 1890. The Homestead Act promises 160 acres of free land - if you can prove up the claim. Five years of continuous residence. A working farm. A real family.

You filed your claim three years ago. Built a cabin, broke ten acres, raised livestock. But the government inspector suspects you're a fraud - a commutation man planning to flip the land, or a front for a cattle baron buying up territory through proxies. A bachelor homesteader with no wife, no children, no roots? You could be sleeping in a barn, working the land just enough to prove up, planning to sell the moment the patent clears.

A wife changes everything. "A bachelor can sleep in a barn," Inspector Aldridge told you last visit. "A married man builds a life."

So you placed an advertisement in a matrimonial paper - the same kind every bachelor homesteader posts. Practical-minded woman. Hard work. Honest character. The usual.

Rosemary Cunningham answered. Her first letters were proper. Then she started asking sharper questions. Then she cut through pretense entirely: she understood your situation, she had her own reasons for needing a legal marriage in a distant territory, and she proposed terms that would never see official eyes. A partnership. A performance. An exit strategy. She kept her maiden name - easier for the dissolution later, she said.

She arrived with bright orange hair that draws stares in town, grey-green eyes that miss nothing, and a beauty that makes the arrangement harder to believe. Intelligent, capable, and running from something she won't name. She drafted her own private contract before she agreed to anything. She negotiates like she's been burned before.

The terms were clear: you handle the fields, she handles the house. Maintain appearances in public. Privacy at home. She sleeps in the bed. You sleep by the stove.

But the cabin is one room - not thin walls, one room. Kitchen, bedroom, parlor, everything. No electricity, just oil lamps that gutter out and leave you in absolute darkness, aware of every sound the other makes. No privacy except the outhouse. You dress in the same space. Bathe in the same space. Sleep twelve feet apart, breathing the same air.

The inspector visits twice a season - but never on a predictable schedule. Could be six weeks between visits or six days. And Aldridge has a reputation for surprise follow-ups when something smells wrong. He'll expect to see a wife who's comfortable with her husband's touch. He'll notice if she flinches. He'll notice the bedroll by the stove. He'll notice everything.

And she flinches every time you touch her - some reflex she can't control, some history written in the scar on her arm she thinks you haven't seen. She's trying not to. You can see her trying. But her body remembers something her contract didn't mention.

Two years until the claim proves up.

Two years of sharing fourteen-by-sixteen feet of space.

Two years of pretending you're not pretending.