If I retain custody, I have legal standing to contest the property transfer. If he takes custody, I have nothing. And he controls everything Harold owned until Lily turns 18. Her voice was very flat now, very precise. She's not his daughter.
She's a legal mechanism. Something hard and cold settled in Sam's chest. He thought about the little girl sleeping by the fire with her button and her enormous wool socks. And he thought about a 28-year-old man who had looked at her and seen paperwork. "He had your coat."
Sam said. It came to him suddenly. The two men. The taller one was wearing a woman's coat over his own. Martha blinked.
Then something shifted in her face. Not surprise, but the specific exhausted recognition of a cruelty so petty it hadn't even registered in the larger accounting of the night. "Yes." She said quietly. "He took it before they brought me outside.
Said I wouldn't need it for long." The fire cracked and shifted. Sam stood, moved to the window, looked out at the snow-buried dark of his property. The storm had dropped to a low, steady fall now. The kind that would be passable by morning if it held.
Which meant the road to Coldwater Creek would be passable, too. Which meant Wade Briggs would know by dawn that his plan had failed. And men like Wade Briggs, in Sam's experience, did not absorb failure quietly. They absorbed it, and they recalculated, and they came back with something worse. "There's a woman in town."
Sam said, still looking at the window. "Agnes Porter. Runs the general store on Main. She was here before the Briggs's were, and she'll be here after. She knows every piece of business in that county, and she has no patience for men who use the law like a private tool."
He paused. "She also knew Harold. Knew what he was under the reputation. She told me once that the day he died, three women she knew breathed for the first time in years." Martha was very still behind him.
You'd go to her? First thing in the morning. He turned from the window. She'll know what we're dealing with legally. She'll know what can be done.
And if nothing can be done? He looked at her steadily. Something can always be done. It just isn't always comfortable. She held his gaze for a long moment.