Something that had been compressed by Harold's patience and Wade's arithmetic and every person who had looked at the ground instead of at her, and it had nowhere left to go but forward. "Let him come," she said. "Let him bring whatever he has. I will be in that courthouse tomorrow, and I will say everything I know, and I will let the judge see all of it. And if Wade Briggs has been promised a favorable decision, then he should have been more careful about which woman he chose to leave in the snow."
Sam looked at her across the table. The fire behind her made her a silhouette, and then, as it shifted, brought her back into full clarity. The red hair and the steady hands and the amber eyes that had been calculating odds since the moment she woke in this cabin and decided against every reason not to, to trust the man who had found her. "Get some sleep," he said. "Can you sleep tonight?"
"No," he admitted. "Then sit with me." She moved the papers aside. "Just for a while. I don't need anything.
I just don't want to be alone with it tonight." He pulled the second chair to the table and sat. She folded her hands on the surface between them. He put his hands beside hers, not touching, just present. The fire settled to coals.
Outside, the stars wheeled over the Colorado mountains in their ancient indifferent pattern. And somewhere south of town, a man named Decker was walking through the snow toward Agnes Porter's boarding house to make the only decision he would ever make in his life that he could be genuinely proud of. And somewhere else, in a lit room in a house that would not belong to him much longer, Wade Briggs was looking at a plan that had begun to develop the specific texture of something that is not going to work and does not yet know it. The morning of the hearing came in hard and clear, the sky a flat, pale white that meant cold without storm. The kind of January day that offers no weather as an excuse and no comfort as a consolation.
Sam had the horses ready before dawn. Martha came out of the cabin in the dress Agnes had sent over the night before. Dark blue wool, simple and well-made. The dress of a woman with nothing to prove and nothing to hide. She had Lily by the hand.
Lily was wearing her good coat and her best boots and the expression of a child who has been told this is an important day and has decided to treat it accordingly. Sam looked at them both for a moment without speaking. "How do I look?" Martha said, not vain about it, practical, the way she was practical about everything, assessing whether she presented the image that the day required. "Like the most reliable person in the room," Sam said.
She held his gaze for a beat. Then she lifted Lily into the wagon, and Sam helped her up after, and they rode toward Coldwater Creek in the cold white morning without saying much, because everything that needed to be said had been said. And everything that hadn't been said yet would have to wait. Agnes was waiting at the courthouse steps with Garrett and Reverend Holt. And beside Holt, which Sam had not expected, were four other people.
Two women from the church auxiliary that Agnes had apparently mobilized overnight, a neighboring rancher named Burris, who had known Harold Briggs for 15 years, and apparently had things to say about that acquaintance, and Decker, who stood slightly apart from the group with the specific posture of a man who has made a decision he hasn't fully made peace with yet, but intends to honor regardless. Martha saw Decker. She stopped on the bottom step. Decker looked at her. He didn't have the face for elaborate expressions.