AN: There are three stories in progress to wrap up (one in a couple of days if all goes well). So, of course, you know that I couldn't sit on this too long.

I own nothing from the Walking Dead. All I own are my own story lines/plots and characters.

I am going to give you the warning that there is discussion of abuse, since this chapter is reflecting on Carol and Ed's marriage. It's not terribly detailed, but I know that some people need to prepare themselves for any mention of such things, so please know it's there.

I hope you enjoy! Please don't forget to let me know what you think!

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It wasn't respectable at all that Carol had only cried about Ed's death because she'd imagined the struggle of caring for herself and her daughter without any help at all. She hadn't cried for the loss of her husband or concern about his eternal soul—which she imagined had to be very warm at the moment.

Carol had only cried for herself and her daughter.

It didn't matter why she'd cried, though. Tears were tears and, coming out of a newly made widow's eyes, they soothed and appeased the local law enforcement and nosy onlookers. She could have been doing little more than chopping onions, with no true sadness in sight, and they would have been satisfied with the show.

That's what most people cared about anyway—the show.

That was what Ed—Carol's now late-husband—had taught her, and he'd taught her well. The show was all that mattered. It didn't matter that he was cruel to her. It didn't matter that he hurt her badly enough that she wanted to die, or that he broke her heart on a daily basis. It didn't matter that the house she'd dreamed would be a home was a place that stunk of fear—her fear, and her baby girl's fear—and Ed's anger and alcohol. It didn't matter that she kept her knees raw from kneeling and praying for some kind of deliverance from this man that had fooled her parents into believing he'd be a good husband for her and better for her than leaving her to take food out the mouths of the other children they couldn't afford to feed.

All that had mattered was that Ed Peletier put on a good show of being a good man when he was outside that door. All that mattered was that, on the few occasions when he did let his wife out of their house, Carol put on a good show of being a good and obedient wife who kept her head down and never so much as let her eyes drift for fear that there would be hell to pay when no one was watching.

All people cared about was the show. What they saw.

Carol Peletier often had marks on her face and her body, but people didn't see those—and when they did, they excused them, because Ed put on a show of being a long-suffering husband who had been cursed with a hellcat of a wife. And, of course, many people were sympathetic to the fact that a man must make his woman mind if she refused to do so. He must help her learn to be respectable.

Ed Peletier drank pretty heavily, and often in public—but never in public on a Sunday. There was no great sin in that. A man that worked hard and had so much responsibility—with a wife that was a lot of trouble on his mind, and a daughter, on top of it all, that was bound to grow up with a streak of her mother—was a man that could be excused from imbibing just a bit.

People saw the tragic moment when Ed, stumbling most unfortunately at entirely the wrong moment, fell in the way of the passing coach. They saw the driver try to stop the team and coach. They saw the bone-cracking, organ-tearing disaster that made Carol a weeping widow.

And then they looked away, because death was something that they saw every day, and a fall like that was nothing more than a tragic accident, and nobody liked to look too closely at ugly things and tragedy.

Carol's tears were enough for them. They were enough to demonstrate the sadness that she felt, as a widow, over the loss of the man who had given her a daughter and done his best to make her a respectable wife. Her tears were enough to keep up the appearances that made the people in this town comfortable and happy.

Carol knew, though, that her tears were not respectable. She knew that her tears weren't honest. She knew that her tears weren't for the sadness she felt at the thought of the loss of her husband.

The tears she'd shed over her husband's death were tears of happiness—tears of finally being free from him—and they mixed with tears of fear because she was truly and completely alone in a world where being a woman alone was nearly an impossible thing.

It would have been respectable for Carol to don widow's weeds for at least a year, and to dress her baby girl in black. It would have been respectable for her to weep and wail at her husband's funeral, and then to spend her days trailing back there—like an empty shell with nothing more than her sadness to fill her—to stand by the wooden cross that marked his final resting place. It would have been respectable to cry and mourn in public for the show of it all, and to duck her head, as she already did, at anyone who dared to try to look her in the eyes—especially if he were a man.

But Ed had left Carol very little money with which to be respectable, and it wouldn't go far. She hadn't brought much of anything into the marriage with her, given that she'd been bought, essentially, out of a poor family in Georgia. Marrying Ed had been the most respectable thing she could do then and, now, she had very little hope of retaining much respectability.

In a town like this, they weren't given to letting women work. All the jobs that women had seemed reserved for the wives and daughter of the establishments' owners. There weren't openings for women who ought to be married or, as widows, seemed to be expected to somehow magically live without any reliable source of income.

The only jobs that seemed open to absolutely any woman who wanted one weren't respectable jobs. Those women weren't respectable women.

And, though Carol realized that she felt very little like a respectable woman, and though she knew she hadn't been born with enough money to hold on too tightly to the rules of respectability, Carol wasn't ready yet to sell her body by the visit. It wasn't the sex she minded. Her husband had taken what he wanted, when he wanted, even when she didn't care to give it to him, because it was what he was owed for marrying her. Carol knew that she could grit her teeth, and close her eyes, and she could endure anything, no matter how foul she found the man who rutted on top of her, but she still wanted something more. She didn't know if she cared so much about respectability, or the show of it all, but she wasn't ready to tie herself to a life in one of those houses.

At least—not here.

Besides that, how would she care for her daughter? She'd never been in one of those houses, but she imagined the women didn't go to and fro with their children slung up on their hips. And though she hated the man who had given her the baby girl, Sophia meant everything to her. She couldn't give her away—no matter how much better it might be for her to go to someone who had more means than Carol—and she couldn't let her starve because her mother was trying to be a respectable widow living off nothing more than a pittance of charity given to her by the church.

It wasn't respectable that Carol dressed in a printed calico dress and not in black, even for Ed's funeral—or that she dressed her daughter much the same—but Ed hadn't left the money for black cloth, and Carol didn't have the time to make new things if he had. It wasn't respectable that she'd already sold everything they had worth anybody buying, including the house, Ed's horse, and the small plot of land, when Ed's body wasn't cold yet, but their neighbor hadn't seemed to care too much for decorum when he'd counted out the money into Carol's shaking hand to expand his farm and told her to take her time with packing.

It probably wasn't respectable that Carol put their few bags of belongings in the back of the wagon that would take them to town, and thanked the neighbor when he helped her get situated on the seat next to him with her small child in her lap.

But Carol was letting go of respectable. She had to. What mattered, now, was simply survival for herself and Sophia.

They made it to town in time for a coach, and Carol held Sophia in her lap for the short trip. She left behind the little town where her husband had taken her and made her his wife. She left behind the nightmares that she'd known there, living with him. She'd only glanced behind her and out the stage window once before she'd kissed her daughter's forehead and entertained her with the rag doll she'd made her shortly after she'd given birth to her.

Sophia was too young to know what was happening. She was too young to care. And all she'd really known of her father was screaming, and crying, and her mother's pain. Sophia had feared him so deeply that she'd howled whenever he'd gotten near to her, and Carol had often suffered extra blows by running to consistently put her body always between Ed and their daughter.

Carol had lost count long ago, but she imagined that Sophia might be two now…or sneaking close to it. She hardly spoke, though, other than to simply say "Mama" or "Mommy" from time to time. Flowers, it seemed, had a hard time blooming when they lived in darkness and were only watered by tears, anger, and hatred, but Carol hoped her daughter might bloom now that there was hope for the sun.

At her destination, Carol took a very modest room at a boarding house that was willing to let her rent by the week after she explained that she was passing through—travelling to meet her husband—and she needed only stay there until she got word from him that he was ready for her to come and bring their daughter to where he was.

It was, Carol reasoned, only a half-lie and, therefore, her soul was likely not to be damned just for having told it.

The house supplied meals for a few extra coins, and Carol bought one meal to take to her room. In the room, she fed Sophia until she was satisfied that the girl couldn't possibly eat anymore of the food. Then, she swallowed her ration practically whole. She wasn't unaccustomed to eating this way. Ed had resented Sophia since the day she'd been born into the world, and much of what she got to eat was from Carol's own plate since Ed complained that there were too many expensive mouths to feed in their home.

Their meagre meal finished, and the plate returned downstairs, Carol washed Sophia with water from the pitcher and got her settled into the middle of the bed. She laid down next to her, gave her the doll that Carol had named Nellie, but which Sophia only seemed to call "Neh," and she told Sophia a story—a beautiful story about brave cowboys and wide open places in a magical land called the West where everything was different than it was here, and dreams could come true.

And when her little eyelids had fluttered closed, Carol kissed her baby girl's forehead again and eased out of bed.

By the light of her lamp, Carol washed herself with water from the pitcher and put on her nightgown. She ran her fingers through her hair since there was no need to brush it. Though a respectable woman would have had long tresses, and though Carol's own auburn curls had once been beautiful, she'd cut off her hair one day with a knife after Ed had grabbed a handful of it and used it to hold her while he did what he wanted to torture her body and to try to break her spirit.

Sawing her hair off with the knife—and making a hell of a mess of it as she did so—had been Carol's way of showing him that, though he may break her body again and again, he would never, never break her spirit. Not entirely. Not for always. Not the way he'd wanted.

Now, perhaps, she could let her hair grow beautiful again. She'd never be beautiful—she never had been; Ed was probably right about that—but at least her hair could be beautiful.

By lamplight, Carol found the little piece of paper that had made the decision for her to come here. She delicately unfolded it and smoothed out the creases. She read, again, the words she'd read a thousand times.

The West was a place where dreams came true. It was a land of wide-open spaces and infinite possibilities. It was a land of gold. A land that truly flowed with milk and honey.

And it was a land where women were scarce and cowboys needed wives—and some would even take women who weren't, as the advertisement said, entirely respectable.

It wasn't respectable that Carol had torn that advertisement from the paper days before her husband's tragic accident. It wasn't respectable, either, that Carol had been in town that fateful night, under cover of dark and dressed as a new cowhand come to town to look for work to earn his way on one of the shiny trains headed out west. It wasn't respectable that, as soon as the sun rose, Carol intended to make her way to the office where she could seek a different life in the great place called the West with a man she didn't know.

But—try as she might, and want it as much as she did— Carol had never been really good at being respectable.