Sadie always knew she was different. She just didn't know how to tell her mother.

While other girls her age grew up lovingly caring for dolls and dresses. She staged elaborate stories with hers. They fought and had sticks for guns. Fighting outlaws and hunting bears. She would escape from her mother's surveillance to the yard behind their home, doll clutched in her tiny hand. She'd come back when the sun was arching across the sky in a golden streak, mud on her dress and leaves in her meticulously curled hair.

More often than not she went to bed hungry but after a few days of placating her mother, she would do it again.

Her father taught her to ride horses. A begrudging compromise from her mother.

"But," she said, fingers smoothing out her skirt as she sat primly on the edge of her chair, "she needs to learn how to ride like a proper lady."

She despises side-saddle.

"It's dumb," she says from her perch on the Shires' saddle, "I ain't that type of lady."

Her father would chuckle, quietly correcting her posture as he leads the horse.

"I'm not that type of lady."

She rolled her eyes, slouching, as the horse rocked her back and forth. Her father came to a stop under the shade of the tree, patting the neck of the horse.

"What if I taught you how to really ride?"

Like many six year olds she eyed her father with thinly veiled anticipation and suspicion.

"What about mama?"

Her father winked at her, putting his finger to his lips.

"You let me worry about that."

She learned to ride both side-saddle and the true way. Her mother, while never actively engaging with her studies and held a detached interest in her horse riding lessons, seemed happy enough. Sadie quietly promised herself that if she ever did marry and had kids she would never teach her daughter how to be a "proper lady." She'd let her cuss and wear pants and do all kinds of unladylike things.

When she met Jake, he looked at her like the sun rose and fell with her breath. She looked at him like he was crazy. He never pushed her to be like the lady her mother had taught her to be. He was a good man, kind and gentle, even less of society's idea of a gentleman. She couldn't help but think they matched.

She wasn't much of a lady.

He wasn't much of a gentleman.

She liked to shoot guns.

He preferred books.

She was rough and blunt.

He was gentle and calm.

She loved him for all the ways he let her be herself. He never asked more or less of her. When he asked her to marry him in the field behind her home, she kissed him until the need for air forced them apart.

She rode through the field on the back of his horse, head leaning against his back, eyes closed, as she listened to his soft voice tell her all the plans he had. All the dreams.

She never liked riding side-saddle.

But for him?

Maybe just this once.