On the second evening, Margaret came to the study. She sat across from him the way she always had, but something in her posture was different—less certain of its own authority, more considered.
"How long before you go back?" she said.
"Soon," he said. "She said she'll talk."
He looked at his mother.
"I went back up the next morning after I came home," Margaret said. "I wanted to see Agnes Whitfield. We have some things in common, Agnes and I. Both widowed. Both managing property alone." She looked at her hands. "Agnes told me... she said she'd talk when you came back."
He sat with that. "Mother, why did you go back?"
Margaret was quiet for a moment—the quiet of someone deciding something. "Because I said what I went to say, and I wasn't certain I'd said it correctly," she said. "I wanted to see her face when she thought about it afterward, to see if it had meant anything."
"Did it?"
"She wasn't angry," Margaret said. "I expected anger. She's... she has more grace than I deserved." She looked at him. "I owe a great deal of that situation to my own behavior. I know that."
"Yes," he said, not unkindly.
"I'd like... if she comes back, I'd like to do it differently." She said it the way Margaret Whitmore said most things: as a statement, not a request. But underneath the statement was something unfamiliar—something that Nathaniel recognized slowly as vulnerability. His mother had not been vulnerable in front of him since he was a small child. "I'm telling you because you should know that the house is different. Not just because she managed it well, but because I... I managed it badly, in ways I didn't see."
He looked at her: this woman who had raised him to believe that marriage was arrangement, that women were to be managed, that the proper expression of feeling was its successful suppression. She had not done it maliciously; he understood that now. She had taught him what she knew. It had been insufficient teaching.
"I know, Mother," he said.
She nodded. She stood. "Don't wait too long," she said. "She said she'd talk when you came back. Go back."
She left.
He rode north on the fourth morning. He pushed the horse harder than he had on the first trip up—not from anxiety, but from the particular momentum of a man who knows where he is going and why.
He arrived at Agnes Whitfield's property at midday. Agnes opened the door before he got to the gate. She looked at him. She looked at the horse. She looked at him again.
"That was fast," she said.
"Three days," he said. "I handled what needed handling."
Agnes tilted her head slightly—a small acknowledgment. "She's at the creek," she said. "Working on something for the Beal family. Go on."
He went.
Evelyn was sitting on a flat stone above the creek with papers on her knee and her shoes off, which was the most informal he had ever seen her, and which meant something about what the mountain had given her that the valley never had. She heard him coming. She looked up. She looked at him for a moment, taking him in the way she took everything in.
"Three days," she said.
"The grain situation needed immediate attention. I handled it." He sat down on the ground near the stone. Not above her, not beside her—near her, which was its own statement. "Curtis kept his job. I made a list of every worker on the property. The barn plans are drawn up. The grain is sourced." He paused. "I also spoke with Calvert for forty minutes about everything you did that I didn't know about."
She was quiet.
"He told me about the sick worker," he said. "The east property. The rain."
She looked at the papers on her knee.
"Why didn't you tell me about that?" he said.
"You didn't ask."
"I know. I'm asking now. Why didn't you tell me?"
She looked at him. "Because by the time I understood that you weren't going to ask, I had also understood that telling you without being asked would feel like requesting credit for something I'd done because it needed doing. And I don't do things to receive credit."
He held that, turned it over. "That shouldn't have been the choice you had to make," he said.
"No," she agreed. "It shouldn't."
"It won't be again."
She looked at him directly. "How do I know that?"
"You don't," he said. "Not yet. That's going to take time. I understand that." He met her eyes. "I'm asking for the time."
The creek moved beside them. A bird said something in the sycamore above. The mountain afternoon had the quality it always had: the particular, unpurchasable clarity of a place that had no concern for human arrangements and all the patience in the world for human growth.
"Tell me something you learned," she said.