Caleb still sleeping. Nathan drove and she sat beside him and neither of them felt the need to fill the miles with talking, which had become one of the things she valued about being with him. The silences that didn't require explanation. Halfway back, he said without looking at her.
Are you all right? She thought about the question honestly before she answered it. "Yes," she said. "I'm not sure exactly what I expected to feel, and I'm not sure what I do feel, but I think I'm all right."
That seems about right, he said. It's not a very romantic answer. No, he agreed, but it's an honest one. She looked at the road and the cold flat land and the sky trying to make up its mind.
I was married once before, she said. She hadn't told him this. She'd thought about when to tell him, and had decided it was the sort of thing that should be said sooner than it became conspicuous. For 11 months, he was a lawyer in Columbus.
It didn't. She stopped, chose the precise word. It didn't suit either of us. He wanted something I couldn't be, and I wanted something he couldn't offer, and we both figured it out too late.
Nathan didn't respond immediately. She gave him the time. What did he want? He said, "Simpler," she said.
"A simpler woman." Nathan was quiet for another stretch of road. Then he said, "I'm not looking for simpler." I know that.
That's part of why I said yes. He glanced at her then briefly, the kind of look that had too many things in it to be called just one thing, and then looked back at the road. She didn't tell him the rest of it, that the Columbus lawyer had told her on the day they agreed the marriage was done, that she was too much for most men, and she'd be alone for the rest of her life. She'd believed him for longer than she should have.
She'd stopped believing him, she thought, somewhere around a Tuesday in September, when she'd walked past a ranch foreman who told her to leave and had decided not to. The Hargrove response came in January, not a new legal filing. Harlon Hargrove was smarter than that. He knew the marriage had changed the ground under the petition, and a man who'd built a mercantile empire didn't throw good money after bad arguments.
What came instead was a letter addressed to Nathan, written in Harlon's own hand rather than a lawyer's, which told her something about the shift in tactics. Nathan read it at the desk and brought it to her in the kitchen that evening. He wants to visit, he said formally. He's asking to be given regular access to Caleb.