Not in any territory she could find in the territorial code she had been reading in the lamplight after young Henry fell asleep. But Dunar had money. And money had a way of making thin arguments thick, of finding the clerk who filed the paperwork in the wrong order. The commissioner who needed a case to run long enough that the opposing party ran out of resources to keep fighting it. She was not naive about this.
She had grown up watching her father lose a small piece of land to a neighbor who had simply outlasted him in the county records office, wearing him down through delays and refiled motions until he could not afford another trip to the courthouse. She was not going to be outlasted. She was going to move faster than Dunar expected and build a record so solid that there was nothing for him to attach his argument to. She had started that process. Amos was in Durango finishing it.
The rest depended on Edmund Cole, a man she had met once at a campfire outside Canyon City, and had liked immediately, and on whether liking a person was a reliable indicator of their willingness to do right by them, when doing right cost them something. On the fourth evening, young Henry was passed inconsolable and into the territory of genuine indignation, and Clara had walked him in circles for the better part of an hour, and her arms ached, and she was tired in the specific way of a person who has not slept more than three consecutive hours in 6 weeks. She sat down in the rough chair and held him against her shoulder and said out loud to the walls and to no one, "I don't know what you want." Young Henry paused his complaints briefly. Apparently considering this. I have fed you, she said.
I have changed you. You are not cold. You are not hot. I have walked approximately 4 miles in this room. She looked at him.
He looked back with the dark, unfocused intensity of a person who has strong opinions and limited vocabulary. "Your father would have found this funny," she said. "He found most things funny. It was a quality I did not always appreciate in the moment. Young Henry made a sound.
I know, she said. I miss him, too. She had not said that out loud before. Not to anyone. She had thought it constantly.
The way you feel a missing tooth with your tongue over and over, always the same small shock of absence. But she had not said it because saying it out loud required an audience, and she had been careful about what she showed to other people. The grief was hers. It went where she went and she kept it close and she did not perform it. But young Henry was not other people.