Myself, she said. From a ledger I found in a hotel store room. He studied her. From a hotel store room. Yes, sir.
Which pharaoh in Cincinnati. It closed in 1,871. He was quiet. Then to her complete astonishment, he said, "I know that hotel. I stayed there once in 1,862 good beds." "They were," she said before she thought about it.
"I washed the linens." And Walter Carter looked at her for a long moment, and something shifted in his expression, so subtle she would have missed it if she hadn't been watching closely something that moved through the set of his jaw and the line of his shoulders. Some internal adjustment she couldn't name but recognize the shape of. He looked down at her notes again. "Can you fix it?" he asked. "Yes," she said.
It'll take several weeks and I'll need both of you to be honest with me when I ask questions, even if the answers are uncomfortable. I'm always honest, Walter said. Good, she said. Then we'll get on fine. She left the ranch that afternoon with Hector driving the supply wagon and a second load of ledgers in the back and the particular sensation of a day that had gone somewhat differently than she had planned for and considerably better than she had let herself hope.
She sat in the back of the wagon with the ledgers and watched the ranch get smaller behind her and thought about Walter Carter's face in that moment of adjustment. About two men who had been in quiet argument with each other's recordkeeping for years, neither one willing to name it, both of them bleeding money they could have kept, about how the most dangerous disagreements were often the ones that never got spoken aloud. She thought about Nathaniel standing near the door of his father's study, not interfering, not managing, not explaining her or smoothing the way, just standing there and letting her be exactly what she was. She thought about what that meant. She thought about what she was letting it mean.
The wagon hit a rut. She caught the side rail. The Montana sky above her was turning the particular shade of blue gray that happened in the hour before evening. The blue of things about to change. She held on and looked up at it and she thought, "All right, then." Just those three words, small and private, and entirely her own.
"All right, then." And she did not let herself say anything more than that, because she was still a practical woman, and practical women did not get ahead of themselves. But she let those three words sit there, real and warm in her chest as the wagon rolled her back toward Red Willow Creek and whatever was coming next. The ledgers took four weeks. Four weeks of Amelia riding out to the Carter ranch every Tuesday and Friday on the supply wagon, sitting at the desk in Walter Carter's study and methodically rebuilding six years of accounts from the ground up. She worked in the mornings and left before supper, and every time she arrived, Walter was already in the study waiting, which was the closest he ever came to admitting he was interested.
He was, as he had promised, always honest. He was also frequently difficult, occasionally argumentative, and absolutely precise in everything he remembered about every transaction the ranch had ever made going back to 1,858. She found him, under the difficulty to be one of the sharpest financial minds she had ever encountered, which given that she'd encountered it primarily through hotels and boarding houses, was perhaps not the widest field of comparison, but she meant it genuinely. He had built what he had built not through luck but through a quality of attention that most people never developed. She told him so one Friday morning without softening it the way she told him everything.