"She's been doing this before." "I think so." I couldn't prove it before because I wasn't looking. I had no reason to look. He met her eyes.
Now I do. "How much trouble can she make before it costs you the ranch?" He thought about it honestly. Two bad seasons back to back already. If we lose significant cattle, if the supply lines stay shut, if I can't get the lumber for the barn repairs before winter, he stopped.
Maybe 3 months, maybe four. Clara absorbed that. She kept her face steady because panic was a luxury and this was not the moment for it. "Then we have three months to stop her." She said Clara Ethan.
She said his name the way she'd learned to say it level direct with just enough weight to make him stop and listen. "I'm not leaving." We've already established that. So the only question is what we do next. And sitting here measuring how bad it can get doesn't help either of us.
He looked at her for a long moment. Something passed through his face. Not quite admiration, not yet, but the predecessor of it. The thing that comes before admiration when a man is surprised by someone and doesn't entirely know how to say so. There's a man in town, he said finally.
Retired circuit judge Harlon Beckett. He knows things about the law in this territory that nobody else does, and he's got no love for the Caldwell name. William Caldwell cheated him on a land deal 20 years ago and Beckett has a memory like a steel trap. He paused. I've been avoiding going to him because going to him means this becomes official.
Becomes a thing I'm fighting instead of a thing that might just stop. It's not going to stop. Clara said, "No," he said. "It's not." "Then go see the judge."
He nodded slowly like a man who has just walked through a door he can't walk back through. "I'll go tomorrow," he said. He went, but tomorrow had something to say first. That evening, Noah came in from the barn with a split lip and blood on his collar and the look of a boy who'd been in a fight he wasn't going to apologize for and come through the door and was across the kitchen before he got two steps in. "Sit down.
Down," she said. "I'm fine. You're bleeding on my clean floor. Sit down." He sat.
His jaw was set in the way of his father's jaw when Ethan was bracing for criticism, and Clara noticed it with the part of her mind that kept track of such things. She brought the cloth in the water and sat across from him and started cleaning the cut above his lip. "Who?" She said. He didn't answer right away.