La Conquistadora

A quarter million acres of New Mexico mesa and canyon, where the land has been outlasting everyone’s plans since before anyone called it La Conquistadora. At the heart of it, Casa Blanca — an old whitewashed adobe standing since 1824, through land grants and wars and droughts and the long procession of people who poured their lives into country that never so much as learned their names.

Into the summer of 1946 rides Adam Connor, a cowboy back from four and a half years of war, returning to the only place that kept him sane. The manager’s daughter was too young to notice before he left. Now her step slows when she passes him in the saddle shed, and his mind won’t stay where he puts it. On a ranch this vast, under a sky this big, there is nowhere for what’s growing between them to hide — least of all from her mother, a woman who has never once stood at the wrong distance from anything.

Two summers separated by twenty-three years. The first that took everything away. The second that almost gave it back.