The flat area of the valley resembled a parking lot, but one filled with an unusually high percentage of trucks and SUVs—even for Montana. The three tractors and the backhoe completed the picture.

Maybe, Anna thought, approaching Charles’s truck (and though they’d been married for a while now, it was still Charles’s truck), a parking lot of a feed store.

Her orders were to bring the truck as close to the front door of the cabin as she could so that Asil and Charles could load it with whatever they found in the cabin. Either there was a lot of it, or it had been difficult to secure because it...