"You come back," Agnes said.
"I will," Evelyn said.
"I mean it. Not just visits." Agnes looked at her steadily. "The school needs... Miss Harmon is good, but she's going to need support when the county comes around about the funding. You've already got the Aldermans on your side. That letter you wrote to the board is still sitting on somebody's desk."
"I'll write another one," Evelyn said.
"You'll come back and write it in person," Agnes said. "Harder to ignore a woman in the room than one on paper."
Evelyn smiled. It was full this time: unguarded, warm, the smile of a woman in the presence of someone who has never once required her to be smaller. "Yes, ma'am," she said.
Agnes looked at Nathaniel. "You."
He met her eyes.
"She's good at more things than you know," Agnes said. "And she's going to keep discovering more. Your job is to stay surprised, not threatened. Surprised." She paused. "Can you do that?"
"I'm working on it," he said.
"That's the right answer," Agnes said. She turned and went back to her property without ceremony or looking back, because that was Agnes Whitfield, and she had said everything that needed saying.
Thomas Reed was at the road. He hadn't been there when they left the property, and Nathaniel wasn't sure how he'd arrived ahead of them, but there he was, standing at the junction where the mountain path met the south road, with his hat in his hands and the unhurried look of a man who has decided to do something and has done it.
He looked at Evelyn first. "You take care of yourself down there."
"I will," she said. "Thank you, Thomas. For everything."
He nodded once. He looked at Nathaniel. "You know what you're carrying?" he said.
"Yes," Nathaniel said.
"Don't forget it when the valley starts looking familiar."
"I won't."
Reed put his hat on. He stepped back from the road. "Mind the ruts on the south descent," he said. "It rained Tuesday, and the clay won't be set yet." Then he walked back up the mountain path and didn't look back either, because that was Thomas Reed.
They rode south. The valley looked familiar and different simultaneously: the red clay roads, the tobacco fields, the wide Virginia sky pressing down with its particular summer weight—all of it the same, and all of it somehow seen through different eyes.
Nathaniel had left this landscape a man who believed his sight was accurate. He was returning as a man who understood that his sight had been shaped entirely by what he'd been taught to value, and that the teaching had been insufficient.
Evelyn rode beside him. She did not speak much on the first hour of the road. She was doing what she always did: taking things in, processing, arriving at conclusions she would share when she was ready and not before. He had spent two years misreading that silence as absence. He understood now that it was presence of a particular kind—the kind that was all interior. He left her to it.
After the second hour, she said, "I want to write to Miss Harmon once a week."
"Of course."
"And I'd like to send books. There aren't enough books up there for the level the children are reaching."
"We have three hundred volumes in the estate library that nobody reads," he said. "Take what you want."
She looked at him. "You mean that? Every word?"
"She looked at the road. "Your mother is going to find that excessive."
"My mother," he said, "is currently in the process of becoming a different person. I'm not going to interfere with that." He paused. "She might surprise you."
"She already did," Evelyn said. "Coming to the mountain was the last thing I expected from her."
"She has always been capable of the right thing," he said. "She just needed to understand which thing was right." He paused. "We all needed that."
Evelyn was quiet for a moment. "Then what will you tell people about why I left? About where you've been?"
He had thought about this on the road down. He had considered several versions: the managed version, the strategic version, the version that preserved maximum dignity for both of them in the social context of their county.
"The truth," he said.
She looked at him sharply.
"I said something inexcusable," he said. "I said it in front of witnesses. Half the county already knows—the Hargroves were staying with us. Carter Hargrove filed a legal claim on behalf of a man he believed was dealing with a distracted landowner." He looked at her. "There's nothing to protect here except the truth. And the truth is that I failed, and you left, and I went after you, and I had to learn some things, and we are coming back together because we chose to." He paused. "I think that's a better story than anything I could invent."
She looked at him for a long moment. "People will say I went back because I had nowhere else to go."
"Let them," he said. "The people who know you will know that isn't true, and the people who don't know you will learn."