Chapter Text
A year after he leaves, Paul buys you both a little house by the creek. It's not much (it's a fixer upper for sure - most of the roof's shingles need replacing, the outhouse still leaves much to be desired and you have to huddle up together at night to keep warm, not that you're complaining), but it's yours and you make do.
You miss Little Boston, sometimes. Miss the Sunday girls the most.
You become a Sunday girl yourself, not too long after you both settle down. You'd expected it to just be in name only, a common law marriage, but he surprises you one day, gets down on one knee one night after dinner and proposes.
He'd asked you once, years ago, back when you were both 15 or some such. You'd been posted up behind the goat shed, laying in the shade and enjoying the temperate warmth of the first day of Spring when he'd turned to face you, squinting slightly to keep the sun out of his eyes, and had just— asked you, straight to the point as per usual.
He makes good on his promise to marry you one week later at the chapel on the hill, with strangers for witnesses. If it was up to Paul, you wouldn't attend the church at all - he doesn't need 4 walls and a steeple to commune with God. Paul sees Him in everything; in the kind eyes of the strangers that took y'all in in those first few months, in the dew drops that coat your humble crops come daylight—hell, Paul sees Him even in the broken leg he'd gotten when he'd fallen off the roof while trying to mend it.
To him, church is everywhere.
You convince him to go anyway, more for your sake than anything else.
You're newcomers to this town - outsiders - and the locals aren't sure of what to think of you at first. Paul'd more or less proved himself worthy working odd jobs on the ranches, fixing up carts and such, but he'd get more substantial work if the men trusted him, and for the men to *really* trust him, their wives need to trust you.
Plus, you get lonely when he's out.
Afterall, there's only so many times you can dust the mantlepiece before you start getting cabin fever.
You know you're really 'in' when the deacon's wife has y'all over for dinner one night after Sunday service. She's ancient, and almost completely blind in one eye but she still runs the social scene in Cainswyck and where she goes, others follow.
Slowly but surely, the strangers become familiar faces, then acquaintances and, finally… friends.