He is studying her face now. We won, she tells him. He puts his fist in his mouth. She takes that as acknowledgement. She sends word to Amos through Tommy, who arrives that afternoon for his regular visit and goes back north with a note that says, "Only the determination came.
We're clear." She thinks about adding more and decides the rest can wait until she says it in person. He comes the next morning. She hears the horse and comes to the door and he is dismounting faster than necessary. And when he turns and sees her standing there, he stops. Just stands there with the res in his hand.
It's done. Denied in full, she says. Cole's statement, the settlement record, the photographs. Aldrich found no basis for Dunar's claim. Amos lets the breath out slowly.
He looks at the cabin, the clearing, the frostcovered garden. He looks at her. Good, he says. The word is insufficient for what she can see in his face, which is a relief so deep it has clearly been pressing on him for weeks, heavier than he had been showing. She had known it was there, seen it in the twice weekly visits that had no stated reason in the photographs, in the way he had looked at the hearing room when Aldrich took notes.
But seeing it come off his face now is different from knowing it was there. Come inside, she says. The coffee is on. He ties the horse and comes in and she sets a cup in front of him at the table she built and sits across from him with her own. Young Henry is in the cradle making the small investigative sounds of a person who is awake and still deciding how he feels about it.
Dunar won't come back. Amos says the record is too solid. And because everyone who matters in this territory now knows who you are and what you built and that you are not going anywhere. She looks at him steadily. That's not nothing.
No, he says it's not. The fire settles in the stove. Outside, the wind moves through the pines on the north boundary. The sound that has become the sound of this place, her place, as particular and identifiable as a voice. I don't know what I'm asking, he says finally.
He says it the way a careful man says a true thing he has been sitting with too long with the discomfort of honesty and the relief of finally being done with sitting. I'm not trying to I know what you're not trying to do. She says you've been very clear about it. So clear that some days it is almost funny. She says it without cruelty.