My husband's family. They're going to say I married for money and gave nothing back and that they had to throw me out before I ruined them. She kept her voice level, but she saw the way Nathaniel's hands curled slowly into fists at his sides. Charles found them, Nathaniel. He went digging into my past, and he found the exact people who'd say the exact worst things about me, and he's bringing them to that hearing to break me.
For a long moment, Nathaniel didn't speak. When he did, his voice was very quiet and very hard. And Eleanor understood she was hearing something rare from him. The sound of a patient man's patience running out. "Then we'll bring the truth," he said.
"All of it. Everything they threw away, we'll put in front of that judge, and we'll let him choose which story to believe. The one where you're a woman who takes everything and gives nothing." He looked down at Clara, still wrapped around Eleanor's neck, then back up at Eleanor herself. Or the one where a girl who lost her mother stood on a porch and told a rich woman to her face that you're worth fighting for.
Eleanor felt tears sting her eyes and for once she didn't fight them. "Two days," Nathaniel said., "Two days till the hearing. Let him bring Boston. Let him bring his sister and his letters and every ledger he owns." He reached down and pulled Eleanor to her feet, keeping her hand in his.
Clara pressed between them. Because we're going to walk into that courtroom as a family and we're going to walk out of it the same way and there's not enough money in this whole territory to change what's true. Eleanor wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe it with her whole heart. But even as she stood there in the ring of her new family's warmth, she could not quite shake the memory of Prudence Whitaker's cold certain smile or the ugly confidence with which she'd promised that Boston would have its say.
Because Eleanor knew those people. She knew exactly how far they would go to be proven right about her. And she knew that Charles Whitaker, whatever else he was, had chosen his weapon well, aiming it straight at the one wound in her that had never fully healed. Whatever waited for her at that hearing, it would not be a fair fight. It would be everything she'd survived once already dragged back into the light in front of a whole town, waiting to decide whether the widow from Boston was a woman worth believing.
And this time there would be no train to carry her quietly away. The two days before the hearing passed slower than any Eleanor had ever known, and the night before it, she did not sleep at all. She sat at the kitchen table long after the house had gone quiet, a lamp burning low, going over in her mind every ugly thing Boston might send and every way it might land. She had learned in her old life that the worst blows always came dressed as facts. And she was trying to armor herself against them the only way she knew how, by imagining them ahead of time, so they couldn't take her by surprise.
She didn't hear Nathaniel come down until he pulled out the chair across from her. "You ought to sleep," he said. "So should you." "Can't." He sat two cups down and poured coffee neither of them needed.