"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 the 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. The letter from Gerald Foss arrived 4 days after Orson rode away from Red Spur, and it contained information that reorganized everything Miriam had allowed herself to feel cautiously optimistic about. Orson's San Francisco lawyer, a man named Harlon Briggs, who apparently specialized in exactly this kind of case, had filed a counterargument to the abandonment documentation that was more sophisticated than Miriam had expected. The argument didn't dispute that Orson had left.
It disputed the characterization of why he'd left and what he'd intended when he did. Briggs had constructed a narrative in which Orson Hensley was not an abandoning husband, but a desperate man who had gone to California to secure his family's financial future, who had fully intended to send for them once he was established, and whose plans had been disrupted by circumstances beyond his control. The note the four sentences on the kitchen table which Miriam had kept and given to Foss was being characterized as a communication written in a moment of extreme distress that did not reflect Orson's true intentions. Miriam read the letter twice at the kitchen table while Bramwell stood by the window reading his own copy. He's rewriting it, she said.