I'm aware. So why didn't you? He handed her the cup of broth he'd been keeping warm. She took it. He pulled the chair up to the bedside and sat, leaning his elbows on his knees, his voice quiet and even in the way he used when the truth needed to be said plainly.
"When I was 20 years old, I watched a man get left in a mine collapse because the foreman decided the rescue would cost too much," he said. "Man had a wife and three kids. Foreman went to church every Sunday. Entire town respected him. Nobody said a word."
Sam looked at his hands. "I said a word. Got fired the next morning. But the thing that stayed with me 30 years, it isn't the foreman. It's every other man who was standing there and looked away."
He met her eyes. "I don't look away." Martha was quiet for a moment. The fire shifted. Outside, the storm was beginning to ease.
And in the new quiet, Sam could hear the particular silence of a world buried in snow, heavy and complete. The silence of a landscape that has swallowed every sound whole. "Wade Briggs is going to come here," she said. "Probably." "He'll bring the sheriff.
He has an arrangement with Sheriff Calhoun, has for years. Harold did, too." Her voice was controlled, careful, the voice of someone presenting a case rather than expressing a fear. "He's going to tell Calhoun that I fled the Briggs household in a state of mental distress following Harold's death. That you found me wandering and brought me here with good intentions, but that I need to be returned to family care.
And Calhoun will believe him, or he'll pretend to, which amounts to the same thing. "And the ropes?" A short, terrible pause followed. Wade will say I did it to myself to gain sympathy, to manufacture a story. She looked down at her wrists.
He'll say I'm unstable, that Harold always worried about my stability, that I've made accusations before. The steadiness in her voice didn't waver, but something behind it did. Something she was holding at arm's length with enormous practiced effort. He's thought this through. He's been thinking it through since before Harold was cold.
Sam studied her. You knew this was coming. I knew the moment Harold died that Wade would move on the house and the land. She set the cup down. I didn't know he'd use Lily.
That was She stopped and reset. I underestimated how far he'd go. What exactly does he want with her? Harold's estate doesn't fully transfer to Wade until all dependents are settled. As long as Lily is considered an unsettled dependent, a minor child without a proper guardian, Wade controls the administration of the estate.