"Is it affecting how you see the situation?" She asked. She kept her voice level. Honestly, he looked at her straight.
No, some people in your position would find it easier to let me go. Some people in my position, he said, would have let Briggs turn you away at the gate. He pushed the letter to the side like it was something he was done looking at. I'm not concerned with the easiest thing, Evelyn.
I'm concerned with the right thing. She nodded. She didn't trust herself to say much more than that. What happened in Grace Falls over the next two weeks was the particular kind of social campaign that wealthy families had always been able to conduct in small towns, which was quiet and pervasive and difficult to directly address because it never quite came out in the open where you could see it whole.
The Hargroves had connections. Margaret had grown up partly in Laramie, but her family was known in the region, and Harlon Hargrove knew how to make his version of things the version people heard first. She felt it when she went into town. In the way conversations paused at her entrance and resumed at a different register when she left.
In the way Mrs. Aldridge at the dry goods store served her with a politeness that had a new stiffness in it. In the way two women she'd spoken to pleasantly at the post office 3 weeks ago now had business on the other side of the street when they saw her coming. She went about her errands. She said good morning to people who said it back and to people who didn't.
She bought what was on the list. She loaded the buckboard and she drove back to the ranch and she did not let any of it show until she was alone in the kitchen and the door was closed. And then she stood at the counter for a few minutes and just breathed. Calhoun came in for his coffee and found her standing there and read the situation with the silent accuracy of a man who'd been watching things for a long time.
"Town giving you trouble?" He said. "I can manage town." He poured his coffee and didn't push it.
Then he said, "Hargrove came out here last week when you were in Laramie with Nathan." She looked up. "What?" Came to the bunk house, talked to the men, asked questions about how things ran here, what he called the domestic arrangements.
Calhoun's voice was careful, but she could hear what was underneath it. Briggs talked to him. She felt something go cold and then make herself stop feeling it because cold wasn't useful right now. What did Briggs say?
I don't know exactly. I wasn't in it. Dolan told me later. He drank his coffee.