Then Silas's voice look through the door. You awake? Yes, she said. A pause. Can't sleep either.
She sat up. She looked at the door. Is something wrong? No, he said. I just stopped.
I wanted to say something. Martha got up and opened the door. He was standing in the hall with his boots off and his shirt untucked. The way a man looked when he'd given up on sleep. And he looked at her and then at the floor and then back at her with the expression she had come to know as his version of working up to something.
What Henry went through, he said, what you've been carrying. I didn't understand the full shape of it until today in that office. Martha leaned against the door frame and waited. My brother died on a river crossing. Silas said spring thaw 20 years ago.
I've told myself a hundred different versions of why it happened and who was at fault and whether there was something I could have done. And after enough years, you find a version you can live with. He looked at her. But you didn't get to do that. Someone took the version you could live with and made it into something else and you had to start over.
She was quiet for a moment. When Henry died, she said, "Finally, I thought it was the kind of loss you survived because you had to because there was no other option." She looked down at her hands. Then I found out it didn't have to happen and I had to find out how to survive that instead, which is a different thing entirely. Yes, Isa said softly. It is.
They stood in the hall in the near dark, not touching, not moving toward each other. But something between them had shifted in the way things shifted when two people stopped keeping themselves at a careful distance and stood close enough to the truth of each other to feel it. Go to sleep, Martha, he said. You first, she said. Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
He went back to his room. She went back to hers. She lay down. And this time, after a while, she slept. In the morning, she picked up the certified copies of the repair orders and sat with Silas in the lawyer's office, going through them pa page by page while Garrett watched.