After ten years of nursing her mother, Olivia Baker is thanked, praised, and then ignored once the funeral is over, a woman who has been needed all her life and never once wanted.
She answers an advertisement from a Colorado doctor seeking a sensible woman to make a home for a motherless girl.
Dr. Charles Aldridge writes with the plain honesty of a diagnosis, offering respect, an honest living, and a home while refusing to promise affection, and he warns that the town calls the child a jinx, that women cross the street to avoid her,
and that his housekeeper of eleven years quit rather than cook for her.
Olivia buys a ticket anyway and arrives to a husband reading from a list, a silent red-haired girl who offers the worst word about herself at the door, and a mining camp unwilling to forgive either of them.
She came only to be useful through one long winter and two locked hearts, never meaning to fall in love.
