Even by the time she got on the train, she was the person she'd always known she really was - not who her mother wanted her to be, that was certain, but she'd made herself stop caring about that a long time ago. The man who owned the livery stable hadn't cared whether she was Joanna or John, as long as the horses were clean and well-fed; she could tote a bale of hay as well as the next boy, which was all that mattered at the end of the day. Now she was heading west, out to where no-one would know who she was, only who she wanted to be. What she wanted to be, from the moment she first picked up a dime novel, seeing her place firmly marked out in the heat and dust of the West alongside men who didn't hesitate to shoot anyone who stood in their way. She'd waited while her mother lived, torn as she was; it had been a slow death, lingering on for weeks and months when every halt of breath seemed like the end and never was. Even though she knew her mother's image of her and her own could never reconcile, Joanna hadn't been able to tear herself away from her bedside, knowing there'd be time enough for her reality some time soon. Even if soon seemed an eternity away at times. The novels were her only release, tucked inside 'improving' books for the sake of her mother's peace of mind as she sat at the side of her sickbed, she'd revelled in tales of desperate men and the towns they ruled with an iron fist. And now it was real. All of it, the dusty main street where the stagecoach stopped once a day, laconic gunfighters with unreadable expressions on their face, everything she'd dreamed of every night in Boston. All real and all hers, if she had the nerve to take it. "Hey, this ain't your stop!" "Oh, it is now. This is why I came west." With a deep breath, JD Dunne climbed from the stagecoach headfirst into a world of trouble.

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