Whatever's available?"Orson looked at him with the gruff patience he'd been gradually developing in Toby's presence. Beans mostly. Toby considered this with a six-year-old somnity. I don't like beans, he said. Nobody likes beans, Orson said.
You eat them anyway. Toby thought about this wisdom and appeared to find it acceptable. Gideon refilled everyone's coffee without being asked, which was something Mara had noticed. He did as a matter of course the small unannounced maintenance of the people around him that he performed without calling attention to she had learned to accept it without commenting because commenting seemed to embarrass him in some way she didn't entirely understand but respected what happens now Gideon said he was addressing her but he set it to the table looking at his cup with the legal proceedings she said Whitlock manages it from here. I'll need to give testimony at some point.
Probably more than once. She wrapped her hands around her cup. With Ror, I don't know what he does next. He could fight it. He has lawyers and he has money, and he has enough of both to make a legal process complicated, even when the evidence is what it is.
He'll fight it. Orson said,"Men like Ror don't accept outcomes. They find angles. He'll find that the angles look different with an authenticated document in territorial court than they did when nobody had one, Mara said. She said it with more certainty than she entirely felt because the alternative was sitting with the uncertainty, which she'd do later when she was alone and could afford to.
And you? Gideon said he still wasn't looking at her, and she still understood that he was asking the question he was actually asking rather than a different one. I have the farm, she said. Legally, once the freeze goes through, the fraudulent transfer is voided. The property reverts.
She paused. I have a farm that needs work and a son to raise and a lot of decisions I haven't made yet. She looked at Gideon as she said the last part. He looked up. Neither of them said anything else.
Orson studied his stew with the focused attention of a man who was very busy not listening. Z. Toby finished eating, announced that Marjorie had liked him today and had let him touch her ear, which he described in specific detail. Z. The conversation moved the way conversations do when children are at the table toward the immediate and concrete, and Mara was grateful for it because she'd been sitting at the edge of something she wasn't ready to look at directly yet.
3 days after Ferris wrote out with his certified copies, the first word came back from Whitlock. Orson brought it. He'd ridden to town that morning casually for supplies, and come back with information packed between the lines of everything he said. He dropped it on the table in pieces while unpacking the supply bag as though it were incidental. Ror's main account at the territorial bank has been frozen, he said, unwrapping a paper parcel of salt.