His whole case is built on paper, ledgers, notes, letters from Boston. That's his strength. He fights with documents. She looked up. So we don't try to outargue his documents.
We bring our own. That creek, that handshake, 30 years of your family letting the whole valley drink free. That's not just a kindness, Nathaniel. That's the truth of who your family is. And if a whole valley is about to lose their water because a rich man wants to break up a marriage, then this stopped being about me the moment he filed that notice.
Nathaniel frowned. "You want to bring the water into it? At a marriage hearing?" "I want to bring the truth into it. All of it."
Eleanor leaned forward, the exhaustion falling away from her, replaced by something sharper. Charles wants that magistrate looking at one small ugly picture. A desperate widow, a rushed wedding, a man being taken advantage of. So, we make the picture bigger. We make the magistrate see the whole thing.
What Charles really wants and what it'll cost every family in this valley if he gets it. A judge might not care much about whether two strangers married for love. But a judge has to live in this county, too. And a judge might care a great deal about being the man who handed the valley's water to Charles Whitaker. Nathaniel was quiet a long moment, studying her across the lamplight, and slowly something that was almost a smile touched the corner of his mouth.
"His family threw away something valuable when they put you on that train," he said. You know that they thought they were throwing away a burden. Eleanor's voice was steady. "Turns out they were throwing away the one person who'd fight." The county hearing was held in Cedar Hollow's largest building, which was ordinarily a meeting hall and had been pressed into service as a courtroom for the occasion.
And by the time Eleanor and Nathaniel arrived with the children, it was already near full. Eleanor understood why the moment she stepped inside, this was not a private matter. Charles Whitaker had made certain of that. Word had gone all through the county that the Boston widow who' trapped Nathaniel Carter was to be put on trial, and half the town had turned out to watch some out of concern, most out of the simple hunger for spectacle that lived in people everywhere. She felt their eyes land on her the moment she walked in, felt them weighing her, appraising her the same way Prudence Whitaker had on the porch.
She kept her chin level and her hand in Nathaniel's and walked to the front of the room like she had every right to be there because she did, and because she had learned that the surest way to be treated like someone to be pitied was to walk in looking like it. Charles Whitaker was already seated at a table near the front, his sister beside him, a lawyer in a fine gray suit, arranging papers between them. He looked up as Eleanor passed, and he smiled at her, small and certain, the smile of a man who has already counted his winnings. Eleanor did not give him the satisfaction of looking away. She held his gaze until he broke it first.