Hannah Prescott grew up on a cow-calf operation outside Miles City, Montana, third of four kids, where she learned early that romance and competence are the same thing viewed from different distances: the most eloquent thing a man on a ranch ever says is a gate fixed before you asked. She was a 4-H stalwart, the 1989 runner-up for Custer County Fair Queen (she maintains the winner’s horse was better connected), and the only girl in her graduating class who could both quote Jane Austen and pull a calf.

She taught fourth grade in Billings for twenty-two years, and spent the summers driving her mother’s beloved back-roads loop past the ghost towns and depot foundations of the old Territory — the towns that boomed, built a church, and advertised for brides. Somewhere between Bannack and a box of her great-grandmother’s letters (her great-grandparents met by correspondence in 1893; the letters are businesslike until, abruptly, they are not), the Brides of Copper Creek started writing themselves.

Her books are for readers who love the old promises kept properly: a stranger at the depot, vows before supper, a curtain down the middle of a one-room house, and love arriving the long way — as coffee ground fine, a lamp left burning, and a name that starts to fit. The history is real, the heroines read the fine print, and the door stays firmly, cheerfully closed.

Hannah lives outside Billings with her husband, Roy, a retired brand inspector, two barn cats of strong opinions, and her great-grandmother’s letters in a fireproof box she checks more often than the smoke alarms. She still can’t drive past a depot foundation without slowing down.