She spoke about Thomas in the exact language of what had happened without softening it and without dramatizing it. And Whitlock took notes and asked follow-up questions with the precision of someone who had been building a case for a long time and knew exactly where each piece went. At the end, Whitlock set her pen down and looked at Mara over the desk. Ror's attorneys are going to argue that your grief motivated a misreading of the documents, she said. That you believed what you needed to believe to make sense of your husband's death.
I know. Mara said they're going to try to make your reliability as a witness contingent on your emotional state. I know. I want you to be prepared for that. I carried a piece of paper through 4 days of winter on a broken ankle to keep it from being destroyed.
Mara said,"I've been prepared for people to question my reliability since this began. It stopped affecting what I know to be true approximately 3 months ago. Whitlock looked at her for a moment. Then she picked up her pen and wrote something in her notes that Mara couldn't and moved on. Outside the courthouse, Gideon was sitting on the steps with Toby, who had found a stick and was conducting what appeared to be a careful examination of the courthouse foundation stonework with it.
Mara came out into the cold air. And Gideon stood up and looked at her face, reading it the way he read everything quickly, accurately, without projecting anything onto what he found. Okay, he said. Okay, she said. Toby looked up.
Can we eat? Gideon said there might be a place that has real bread. There might be, Mara said. He said he didn't know if it was still there. We'll find out.
The place was still there. The bread was adequate rather than good, but it was warm, and Toby ate two pieces and declared it acceptable, which Gideon received with the straightened expression he used when he wasing something that might otherwise be amusement. They stayed the night at a boarding house and rode out the next morning before full light. The ride back was quieter than the ride in not uncomfortable. Just the particular silence of people who have gotten through a hard thing and are letting the aftermath settle.
Toby slept against Mara for most of the second day, his head on her shoulder, and she held him and watched the country move past and thought about what she was riding back toward. Not away from toward. That distinction had shifted somewhere in the past 3 weeks, and she'd only just noticed it clearly. The spring came the way it always did in this part of the territory, not all at once, not as a single event you could point to, but as an accumulation of small changes that you woke up one morning and realized had added up to something. The quality of the light first, then the ground softening, then the cottonwoods showing the first suggestion of green along branches that had been bare so long they'd started to seem like their beness was permanent.
Mara's ankle healed completely. She noticed this one morning when she'd been on her feet since before light, working on the framing of the first structure on the east parcel, a small building solidly built. Designed to hold four families at a stretch with a separate room for children and a stove large enough to heat the whole space. She noticed it because she'd been working for 4 hours and the ankle hadn't spoken once. And she stood back from the framing to look at what they'd built so far and realized she was standing on both feet with equal weight.