Keziah did not answer at once. She looked at the window, where the light was going and the pole fence on the rise had become a dark line against a sky the color of a peach.
"Because then you'd stop," she said finally. "I'd have to tell you he was dead, and then I'd have to tell you he never wrote to you anyway, and you'd write one more letter saying you were sorry, and then you'd never write again. Why would you? And then there wouldn't be anybody." She was not crying now. Her voice was flat and clear and terrible in its reasonableness. "Nem didn't talk. He went out in the morning and came back after dark and ate and went to bed, and I don't blame him, he was grieving. Mrs. Dimmock came over and told me I'd have to go somewhere. And every two weeks there was a blue envelope from Reading, and you'd tell me about the shop, and your sister's babies, and the man who wanted you to set his poems in Old English and couldn't spell. And I'd write back about the grass and the creek and the new calves, and it was like Caleb was still at the table. Like he'd stepped out to the barn. If I kept writing it was like he was only in the barn."
Nehemiah made a sound and put his hand over his eyes.
"And then in July," Keziah went on, "Nem said about the druggist in Laramie. And then in your letter that same week you said about Mr. Lusch, and how your brother-in-law said you'd be ungrateful and wicked if you didn't, and how you'd go to the river some nights and look at it. You said you didn't mean anything by that. But I knew what you meant." She looked straight at Linnet. "So I thought, if she comes here, she doesn't have to marry Mr. Lusch. And if she comes here, there's a woman in the house, and Mrs. Dimmock will stop, and I won't have to go to Laramie. And Nem won't be by himself. And I thought, when she gets here, she'll be cross, but she'll be here, and she'll be away from Mr. Lusch, and then she can decide. Like Caleb said. She can decide herself." She drew a breath. "I took the money out of the tin. I knew whose money it was. I know what it was for. I went and stood at the grave and said I was sorry to him first. I'm not saying that makes it right. I'm just saying I didn't do it without knowing."
For a long time nobody said anything at all.
Linnet looked at her own hands on the table. She was angry. She was, she discovered, very angry, angrier than she had been in three years over the type cases on Penn Street; and the anger was not simple, and it would not go in a straight line. She was angry at the girl for the lie, for the six months of letters that had not been from who they said they were, for the signature practiced out of a ledger. She was angry at a dead man for dying in a creek before he could have his honest letter posted. She was angry at the man across from her for telling a child in July that she would be sent away on the first of November, and calling it fitting. She was angry at Prosper and at Absolon Lusch and at her own sister for crying in the kitchen instead of saying no. She was angry at herself, for having been so lonely that she had read nineteen letters and never once let herself wonder.
And underneath all the anger there was something else, small and stubborn, that she did not want to look at yet. It was this: the letters she had loved best, the ones that had asked about her mother, and told her about the grass, and said thank you, I needed someone to tell me that, had not been written by a man who had stepped out to the barn. They had been written by a grieving child who had nobody, to a grieving woman who had nobody, and they had both known exactly what they were talking about, even if only one of them had known who she was talking to.
"I told a lie too," Linnet said.
Both of them looked at her.