Her copper hair and her wooden button and her enormous wool socks. The way she'd put her hand in his in the snow because she'd had no other choice. He thought about her being handed to a man who looked at her and saw a ledger entry. His hands tightened on the reins. Garrett needs to file an injunction against the guardianship petition before Wade can get it heard, Martha continued.
If Garrett can do that, it buys time for the full hearing. In a full hearing with the will presented and the circumstances of Harold's death examined, Wade's legal standing falls apart. She finally looked at Sam. But between now and when Garrett arrives, Wade is going to do something. I don't know what, but he's been too quiet today, and that means he's working.
Agnes is watching, Sam said. Agnes can only watch what's visible. Martha looked back at the road. Wade learned from a man who conducted his worst business entirely out of sight. They rode in silence for a while.
The light was failing fast in the way it did in the mountains in January, the blue deepening to purple at the edges. The cold sharpening from uncomfortable to serious. Sam was thinking about the timber rights and the will and the three days until Garrett arrived and the specific quality of Wade Briggs's face when he said, "This isn't finished." Not angry, not frustrated, but patient, recalculating. "Martha," he said it before he decided to.
She looked at him. "Whatever he does next," he kept his eyes on the road. "We don't have to wait for Garrett to protect Lily. If it comes to something happening before he arrives, anything, I want you to know that I won't let them take her. I don't care what document Calhoun is carrying."
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she wasn't going to answer. Then she said, very quietly, "Why does it matter to you? Really? Not the principle of it. Not because it's right.
You could have a perfectly clean, quiet life if we weren't in it. So, why does it matter to you specifically? Us, Lily, any of this?" Sam thought about the mine in Leadville, about the man left inside it, about all the other men standing in a row looking at the ground. He thought about Clara, who had wanted a man with ambition, and about the six years of silence after, and about what it was like to wake up every morning and realize that the quiet you'd built around yourself was indistinguishable from the quiet of a man who had simply stopped expecting anything from the world.
He thought about a 3-year-old putting her hand in his in the snow. "I've been waiting for something to matter," he said, "for a long time." He didn't look at her. "Turns out I just needed a reason." Martha didn't say anything after that, but when the cabin came into view ahead of them, its windows dark, the last light going out of the sky, she reached over Lily's sleeping form and put her hand briefly over his on the reins.
Just for a moment. Just long enough to be felt. Then she took it back and they rode the last quarter mile in silence. And the stars came out one at a time above the mountains. And inside the cabin, the fire would need to be built up and Lily would need to be carried in and the doors would need to be checked.