If you want to make a case for yourself, make it to the court. And if I don't, then I think you've come a long way for nothing, she said. And I think you should go back to wherever you came from. He looked at her for a long time. He looked at the porch where six children and Bramwell Concaid were standing.
He looked at the house, the barn, the well-kept yard of a ranch that was functioning and warm and full of life. He looked like a man looking at the evidence of what he'd discarded. "This isn't what I expected, " he said, quiet, almost to himself. I know, Miriam said. She wasn't gloating.
She didn't feel triumphant. She felt something simpler and more honest than triumph, the specific feeling of a person who has done the work and is standing in the place the work brought them to. He turned his horse. He didn't say goodbye. He rode back down the road the way he'd come, and the sound of the hooves diminished, and after a while there was just May and the sound of birds in the thaw, and her children on the porch behind her.
Miriam stood in the yard. Henry appeared at her left side, and she felt his small hand push into hers. "Is he gone? " he said. "Yes, " she said.
"Is he coming back? " She thought about Orson's face as he'd turned the horse. The particular blankness of a man who has found the exit and is heading for it. "I don't know, " she said honestly. Tessa appeared at her right side.
"It doesn't matter, " Tessa said. "Does it? " Miriam looked at her daughter at the house that had been empty before they came. At the man standing on the porch steps who hadn't moved, who had stayed exactly where he said he would. No, she said it doesn't.
But she knew in the way she knew practical things that Orson wasn't done. He had a lawyer. He had a court date in June. Whatever he'd shown in the yard today, the surprise, the running out of arguments hadn't been resolution. It had been a first encounter, and Orson had never given up anything quickly that he thought he could use.
The real fight was still ahead, and she was going to need to be ready for it. She squeezed Henry's hand once. She went inside to make dinner. She was right that Orson wasn't done.