I keep waiting to feel angry. I keep waiting for it to hurt the way everything about Boston used to hurt. And it just doesn't. It's like reading about somebody else's life, somebody I used to be. That's because it is somebody else's life.
Nathaniel put his hand over hers. That woman she threw off the train that scared a lone woman with nowhere to go. She doesn't live here anymore. You left her back in Cedar Hollow in the snow the day you decided to stay. Eleanor looked at the letter a moment longer.
Then slowly she walked to the porch where the lamp burned in the window and she did not burn it. She simply set it on the sill. I'm going to write her back, she said. Nathaniel raised an eyebrow. You are?
I am not to forgive her. She's right that she hasn't earned that and I won't pretend she has. Eleanor's voice was steady certain. But I'm going to write and tell her that she was wrong about one thing. She said my strength must have frightened them.
It didn't come from strength. Not back then. Back then I was just surviving same as anyone. The strength came later. It came from a boy who asked me every day if I'd leave.
And a girl who told a rich woman to get off my porch and a man who found me in the snow and never once made me feel like a burden. She looked at Nathaniel. I'm going to tell her that the family she said I couldn't hold on to, the one she said I'd never be worth, I have it now. I built it out of the pieces they threw away, and it's the best thing I've ever done." Nathaniel pulled her against him and pressed his lips to the top of her head and said nothing because there was nothing to say to that.
Some things a person just has to let stand. Spring came late to Wyoming that year the way it always did. But when it finally came, it came all at once. The snow retreating up the mountain sides and the creek. That creek, the one that had nearly cost them everything, running high and free and loud with meltwater across the north pasture.
Charles Whitaker was convicted in territorial court that April, the trial was short. Once 40 families understood that the man who' terrorized them could no longer touch them, the testimony poured in faster than the court could hear it, and the careful paper trail had spent 15 years building became the very thing that hanged him. Not literally. He was sentenced to prison, not the gallows. But the man who walked into that courtroom in his fine coat walked out of it in irons.