He looked at Martha. "All of this rests on you. Your statement, your testimony, the bandages, your composure. Alderman will be looking at you every second you are in that room, and he will be deciding whether you are what Wade says you are. Everything you do tomorrow needs to communicate one thing.
"What thing?" Martha said. That you are the most reliable person in that room. She met his eyes without flinching. "I've had ten years of practice appearing composed while everything around me was not.
I think I can manage one more day." Garrett looked at her for a moment with something that was close to admiration. "I believe you," he said, and picked up his case and went out with Agnes. And then there was the sound of the wagon going back down the road toward town, and Sam and Martha were alone in the cabin, and the fire needed more wood, and somewhere in the back room Lily was starting to stir. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Then Martha said, without looking at him, "Clara "It doesn't matter," Sam said. "It matters to me." She looked at him then, and her eyes were careful and direct in the way they always were when she was about to say something she had decided to say completely. "Not because of what Wade is implying. I don't believe that for a moment, but because she paused.
You've given up a great deal to help us. Your quiet, your clean life, your reputation apparently. And I have never once asked you whether that was something you chose or something that happened to you." He looked at her across the table. "I chose it."
"Every morning since I've been here?" "Every morning since I found you tied to that post." He held her gaze. "Before that, I was just a man waiting out the winter. After that, I had a reason to want spring to come.
He said it simply, without drama, the same way he said everything that was true. That's not complicated, Martha. She was quiet for a moment. Then, very softly, it is to me. Because I have learned to be very careful about the difference between a man who helps because it costs him nothing, and a man who helps because he has decided it is worth the cost.
Her hands were flat on the table. I need to know which one you are before tomorrow. Not for Garrett, for me. Sam thought about six years of deliberate solitude, about the mine in Leadville, about all the mornings he'd woken up and cataloged the work ahead, and not once in that entire accounting had there been anything that resembled wanting. He thought about a three-year-old in the snow, and a woman with rope burns and twenty-two pages of precise, unflinching truth, and a piece of paper nailed to a fence post that said she brought this on herself.
I know what it costs, he said. I know exactly what it costs. And I've done the accounting every day since you've been here. He didn't look away from her. The answer comes out the same every time.