"Miriam put the letter down. He found a lawyer," she said. "Yes, he's in San Francisco, apparently." She looked at the letter again. "Cal didn't work out," she said.
Not a question. She already knew the shape of Orson's failures, the way they built and collapsed. Built and collapsed, always with an explanation that put the fault somewhere else. California had been his great plan, the place where everything would finally go right. The fact that he'd found a lawyer instead of a business told her exactly how well California had gone.
Foss says we should respond formally. Bramwell said he wants to document the abandonment properly. Dates witnesses the condition of the homestead when you left it. He thinks the legal position is strong. It is strong.
Miriam said left in November. He left a note. He took the savings and the food and the horse. If that isn't abandonment by the legal definition, I don't know what is. Foss says the same thing.
She was quiet for a moment. He won't win, she said. Whatever Orson's lawyer in San Francisco told him, he's not going to come here and take my children. I won't allow it. Bramwell was watching her with the careful attention he used when he wanted to understand something precisely.
I know, he said, but we need to be prepared for the possibility that he comes in person, not just through lawyers. She hadn't let herself think about that part yet. She let herself think about it now briefly and practically. The way she approached things she didn't want to approach. Orson in person was a different problem than Orson on paper.
Orson on paper she could handle with documents and dates and a lawyer who knew the law. Orson in person had always had a particular talent for making her feel smaller than she was, not through violence. Orson had never been physically frightening, but through the slow accumulated weight of his certainty, that she was wrong about everything, that her judgment was poor, that whatever she'd managed to do was less than what anyone competent would have done. That particular voice had gotten quieter since November. She realized it sitting at the kitchen table at Red Spur Ranch, which surprised her.
She hadn't noticed it getting quieter. She'd noticed other things. The children settling, her own competence being used rather than dismissed, the gradual unfamiliar sensation of being in a place where the work she did was understood to matter. But she hadn't noticed until right now. That Orson's voice in the back of her head had faded down to something she could almost not hear.