We'll find the money. The whole valley will if it comes to that. A man who stood up today when standing up cost him everything that man doesn't lose his farm. Not while there's a family in this county that drinks from that water. And after today, that's all of them.
Henderson's composure finally cracked. He gripped Nathaniel's free hand and shook it hard, unable to speak, and around them the other families who'd stood the Coopers, the Vances. All of them gathered close, and something passed between all of them in that emptying hall that had nothing to do with judges or rulings or water rights. Eleanor stood in the middle of it, this woman who 3 weeks ago had been thrown off a train and told she was worth nothing, and felt a whole valley close around her family like a wall no rich man's money could breach. It was Clara who put words to it.
She tugged Eleanor's sleeve, and when Eleanor bent down, the girl whispered fierce and certain, "They all know now. They all know you're ours." Eleanor pulled her close and did not trust herself to answer. Ma, that night, back at the ranch, after the children had finally been coaxed to bed, Eleanor and Nathaniel sat at the kitchen table where so many of their hardest conversations had happened. And for a long while, neither of them spoke.
The lamp burned low between them the way it had the night he'd first told her he didn't know what to do with hope. "You set it in front of the whole county," Eleanor said finally. "You know that. You didn't have to. You could have made the same case without ever, I know what I said."
Nathaniel didn't look away from her, and I meant it. I've been meaning it a while now. I just didn't have the courage to say it somewhere quiet. So, I reckon it took a courtroom and a rich man trying to take everything to knock it out of me. A rofful half smile.
Not exactly how a man dreams of saying it. No, Eleanor agreed softly. It isn't. Does it change anything? Me saying it?
Eleanor looked at him across the lamplight. This man who had found her half frozen in the snow and asked her to stay, who had stood up in front of the people who came to watch her ruined and handed her his whole heart without flinching. She thought of the girl she'd been dreaming of devotion and forever, and how that girl had learned that love was a thing that got taken. And she thought of the woman. She was now sitting in a warm kitchen in a house that was hers with two children asleep upstairs who were hers across from a man who had chosen her every single day when he'd had every reason to let her go.
When I stepped off of that stagecoach, she said slowly. "I decided I would never love anyone again. It hurt too much to lose it. I told myself I'd take the roof and the name and the work and I'd keep my heart locked up where nobody could get to it. Her voice caught.