And who has been carrying the specific weight of that particular choice for two days and will likely carry it considerably longer. Thomas Garrett is in Coldwater Creek tonight, Sam said. Tomorrow morning he's going to ask the circuit judge to hear testimony about what happened on this property line two mornings ago. He needs two witnesses who can describe what they did and why. Roy Finch is going to lie.
Sam looked at Decker steadily. What are you going to do? Decker was quiet for a long time. The lantern between them threw long shadows across the snow. Somewhere in the dark, the cattle shifted and settled, and the cold pressed down on everything, and the mountains stood where they always stood, indifferent and enormous, and older than any of this.
Wade said Alderman was already decided, Decker said. Wade says a lot of things. You think he's lying? I think a man who writes a note saying a child will be told her mother chose to leave is a man who is running out of legitimate options and knows it. Sam held his gaze.
I think tomorrow morning, in front of a judge who has never met anyone in this town, you have a choice about who you are. And I think you already know which choice you can live with and which one you can't. Decker looked at the note in Sam's pocket. He looked at the rifle. He looked for a long moment at nothing in particular, which Sam recognized as the look of a man conducting an internal accounting.
I want it on record that I didn't know about the coat, Decker said finally. Or the baby's feet. I was told it was a warning, not He stopped. I want that on record. Tell Garrett, Sam said.
Tonight. He's staying at Agnes Porter's boarding house. Go now before you talk yourself out of it. Decker stood there for one more moment. Then he turned and walked back through the snow toward the road without the lantern, having apparently forgotten it.
And Sam watched him go and thought about the moment in a man's life when he decides, finally, which direction to face. He went back inside. Martha was awake, sitting at the table in the low firelight. She had not been asleep, Sam suspected, and would not be until morning. He put the second note on the table in front of her.
She read it. She read the last line, the handwriting that was smaller and tighter and more controlled than the rest. She sat with it for a moment, looking at those words. Lily will be told her mother chose to leave. With an expression that was beyond anger, beyond grief, in the place where a person goes when they have finally seen a thing for exactly what it is, with no remaining possibility of doubt.
"He thought this would break me," she said. "Yes." She set the paper down carefully. She looked at Sam. And in her eyes was not fear and not despair, but something that had been building for two days and three parts of a story and ten years before that.