Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short story collection Cowboys and East Indians (FiveChapters, 2013) won the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. In 2019–2020, she was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and in 2022, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. She teaches at Colorado State University. She has just finished her novel, from which this is excerpted.