Excerpt from All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She finished sweeping the steps and went inside. Looking in the glass, she could see that her whole pale face was spotted with the dark juice, her hands, too. She wiped herself clean with a damp cloth and went back to the canning, not thinking she'd ever see the man again. But he did come back the next day, and knocked on the door like any gentleman. The sound startled Sadie awake in her parents' old feather bed, and she crept into the living room in her nightgown. Through the curtains she could just make out the shape of a man walking away down the front path. When she cracked the door open, there was a handful of dusty flowers on the stairs and a note. The grocer read it for her later: "My name is Zachary Pollard and I live at the boardinghouse by the bank and this is a gift for you."

He came every day after that, too, though once he learned better, he came in the evening, and they sat on the porch steps with a candle between them and talked. Her parents had been dead two years and he was the first person since their death to speak to her about anything more important than the weather or the cost of flour. He was, he liked to say, mostly orphan himself. His mother was a Chinook Indian, but she had died when he was a boy and now he had nothing left of her but her songs and her language and a fine beaded bangle that he kept wrapped in a handkerchief at the bottom of his trunk. His father was a Scotch-­Irish peddler whom he had not seen in a dozen years. None of this seemed to sadden him. Though he was only twenty, he had a hundred thrilling stories to tell, had traveled much of the country and met all manner of people. "But none like you, Appaloosa," he would say. Sadie had often wished she looked like everyone else, but after she met Zachary she stopped wishing it. He drank her in with his eyes as though the very sight of her were delightful.

She worried it would not last. During the months when she and Zachary were courting, she was convinced every day that he would change his mind and leave her. The day they were married she held his arm so tight she left crimps in the fabric of his shirt, and to put the ring on her finger he had to pry her loose.

By the time the last hot days of summer come, she is restless. Even the weather seems impatient. Great masses of blue-­black cloud gather above the prairie, and lightning cracks sideways at the horizon while the wind sets her hair whipping about her face. Times like these the world feels more alive than any other, like she is only a mosquito resting on the hide of some great beast.

But when the storms end, the stillness is intolerable. She opens Zachary's trunk and riffles the pages of his few small books between her fingers, wishing for the thousandth time that she could read them. She left school at eight when the schoolmistress complained that she was too much of a distraction to the other children, and that she still had not managed to learn her letters. When Sadie failed to learn them even from her mother, her parents took her to a doctor, who said her eyes were weak in a way he could not fix, that she was oversensitive to light, and farsighted; she would not learn to read and probably would not be much of a seamstress. He gave her a pair of dark glasses and sent her home. Standing on her front porch, Sadie hooked the glasses over her ears and looked at the people and horses moving through the artificial dusk the glass created. Brilliant bits of light still stabbed in from the sides of the lenses, and, though she could see better, people stared at her even more than they had before.

She sets the books aside and carefully unpacks the rest of the trunk. Here is the shirt Zachary was married in, a spare horse blanket, a bundle of coins, a wrinkled handkerchief folded in neat quarters, and a long coil of rope. Sadie unwinds it and feels the whole length to satisfy herself that it is sound, and, finding it so, she coils it again. From beside the stove she takes the stout iron bar she uses to stir the fire. She slips a handful of matches into her dress pocket. With the iron bar in one hand and the lantern and rope in her other, she goes outside.

Excerpted from All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva. Copyright © 2018 by Anjali Sachdeva. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.