Hired woman. Nobody. Placeholder. Are they right?
She said. Nathan frowned. What? Legally, is there a case?
Harlon's a wealthy man with a lawyer who knows how to write letters. Whether there's a case or not may not be the relevant question. He sat down. He looked tired in the old way, the way he'd looked the night she'd arrived.
Not the current tired of a busy man, but the deeper tired of someone carrying something that didn't have a set down place. Nathan. She waited until he looked at her. What do you want to do?
He was quiet for a moment. I want my son to know his mother's family, he said. I've always wanted that. I never tried to keep them away.
But I will not have someone else decide how Caleb is raised. Then we fight the letter. It's not that simple. Harlon will have been to talk to people in Grace Falls already.
He's that kind of man. He'll have been building a picture. She thought about that. Grace Falls, the people who'd watched her arrive, who'd seen her at the general store buying supplies on the ranch's account, who'd made their own assessments.
"What kind of picture?" She said, though she suspected she already knew. That you're not what you present yourself as. He said it flatly, not unkindly, just the words.
That there's something improper in the arrangement, a single man and a single woman alone in a house. He looked at the letter. They won't say it crudely, but that's the picture. She sat with that for a moment.
It wasn't a surprise. She'd known in some part of her that she'd kept quiet that this kind of judgment was possible, was probably inevitable. She'd chosen not to think about it because the work had been too immediate and too real to leave room for it. Now it was in the room with them, sitting on the table in the form of a lawyer's careful letter.