He read it. And the expression that crossed his face was the one she hadn't seen before, something that moved through him fast and went cold quickly. The expression of a man receiving information he'd known was possible and had been dreading and had not quite believed would actually arrive. "He set the letter down." She waited.
"It's from my lawyer in Helena," he said. "Someone in California sent a letter to the county clerk's office here. He was very still. Orson Hensley has written to say he's coming back. The kitchen was very quiet.
Outside, the February wind pushed against the windows the way it had been pushing against them for 3 months, and the bread dough sat on the counter, rising slowly in the warmth, and somewhere upstairs a door closed. Miriam looked at the letter on the table. She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked up at Bramwell, who was watching her carefully. "When," she said.
"Spring," he said. He says, "Spring." She nodded once. She turned back to the bread. Her hands were steady.
She noticed this about herself with something that felt surprising her slightly, less like fear and more like readiness, a cold, exact, particular readiness, the kind she'd learned to find in herself in the years when steadiness was the only thing between her children and whatever was coming. Orson was coming back. She'd survived him leaving. She was not not afraid of him returning. She didn't tell the children about the letter that night.
She finished the bread. She served dinner. She listened to Wade describe in exhausting detail the precise method August had taught him for checking a horse's back legs for swelling. And she answered Clara's question about why snow was white and not some other color. And she broke up the argument between Samuel and Nell about whose job it was to carry the water bucket in from the well.
And she did all of this with her hands steady and her voice ordinary. And the letter sitting in the back of her mind like a stone at the bottom of a clear river, visible, heavy, not going anywhere. Bramwell was quiet through dinner, in a way she noticed, but the children didn't. After they'd gone up to bed, and the kitchen was clean, and the fire had settled into its nighttime behavior, Miriam sat down at the table, and Bramwell poured two cups of coffee without asking whether she wanted one, and set one in front of her, and sat across from her, and they looked at each other in the lamplight. Tell me exactly what the lawyer said," she said.
He got the letter. She read it herself this time, all the way through slowly. The lawyer's name was Gerald Foss, and he wrote in the careful, compressed language of someone who was paid to say difficult things without drama. The substance of it was that a letter had arrived at the Carver's Mill County Clerk's office from a Harland Briggs, an attorney in San Francisco on behalf of one Orson Hensley, stating that Mr. Hensley intended to return to Montana Territory in the spring and wished to resume custody of his children and marital relations with his wife.