She stopped with her hand on the latch.
"I appreciate that," she said. "But I think I have had enough of people deciding where I'll go, Mr. Morgan, even kindly. I'll decide that myself. That's the one thing everybody at this table seems to agree on. Even your brother."
She did not sleep much. She lay in a dead man's bed under a quilt that smelled of cedar and read her own letters by lamplight, one after another, in the order Keziah had kept them, and it was the strangest reading she had ever done. She found that she had been more honest than she remembered, and also lonelier. She found a paragraph in April about how she sometimes set a line wrong on purpose, just one letter, so that Prosper would catch it and have something to be right about and leave her alone the rest of the day. She had forgotten writing that. In the margin, faint, in pencil, in the schoolroom hand, someone had written: me too, with Mrs. Dimmock.
At first light she heard the door and went to the window and saw Nehemiah going up the rise toward the pole fence. He stood at the board with his hat in his hand for a long time. Then he came down and went to the barn, and after a while she heard an axe.
Keziah brought out the ranch ledger after breakfast. It was a big canvas-bound account book, with brand tallies and feed bills and the price of a mare from Rock Creek in the front, and in the back, written small to save paper, the drafts of nineteen letters. The early ones were full of crossings-out, and in the margins there were notes in pencil: C says too fancy. C says take out the part about the moon. C says yes. Then, after the twenty-second of April, the notes stopped. The drafts went on alone, cleaner, with fewer crossings-out, as if there were no one left to argue with.
Linnet read them all at the kitchen table while Keziah washed dishes with her back to her and did not turn around once. When she was finished she closed the ledger and sat with her hand on it.
"May I tell you what I think?" she said.
Keziah's shoulders went tight. "Yes, ma'am."
"I think you are the best writer I have ever corresponded with, and I have set type for two congressmen and a bishop. I think what you did was wrong. Not a little wrong. You spent money that belonged to a dead man's stone, that people gave who couldn't spare it. You signed his name to things he never said. You let me cross half a continent believing I was going to marry him, and that wasn't yours to let me do. And I think you did it because you were frightened and alone and nobody in this house was talking to you, and because you had read a letter from me that frightened you on my account, and I don't believe you were wrong to be frightened about that." She paused. "All of that is true at the same time. I don't know how to make it come out to one answer. I don't think it does."