Another pause. "Your cousin Agnes Whitfield?"
"That's right."
He nodded slowly, tapping one finger on the surface of his desk. "She's a capable woman, Agnes."
"She is," Evelyn said. "That's why I'm going."
He studied her for a moment longer—studying, she supposed, the woman who had just walked out of the largest estate in the county with a single traveling case and the composed expression of someone who has already decided everything and is simply in the process of executing.
Then he nodded again. "I'll send word today," he said. "You can wait here. I have a room upstairs my wife uses for guests. You're welcome to it until the stage leaves Thursday."
"Thank you, Mr. Prentice."
"Mrs. Whitmore." He hesitated. "Are you certain?"
She looked at him steadily. "I have never been more certain of anything in my life."
The stage left Alderman's on Thursday morning. She was on it. She sat by the window and watched Virginia flatten and then begin to rise as the road climbed northward. And she thought about her husband—not about what he had done, which she had already considered and laid aside, but about what she was going to do with the strange, wide-open feeling that had settled in her chest like the first morning of a season change.
It felt, she thought, like possibility. She was not sure she had ever felt it before.
Agnes Whitfield met her at the stage stop in Harlan with a wagon, two dogs, and the complete absence of any statement that might be interpreted as pity. She was forty-two, widowed, and had lived alone in the mountains for six years. She had the weathered, capable look of a woman who had decided a long time ago that she was going to manage her own life, and had been managing it with considerable competence ever since.
She took one look at Evelyn—the composed face, the single traveling case, the absence of any visible distress—and said, "There's a room at the back of the house. It gets the morning light."
"Thank you, Agnes."
"You eat?"
"Not since this morning."
"Come on, then."
They did not discuss Nathaniel on the road to Agnes's house. They did not discuss him at dinner. Agnes talked about the summer, the crops, a mare she was trying to train, a neighbor three miles east who had built a new mill and was expecting the whole county to be grateful about it. Evelyn listened. She ate. She felt the mountain air come through the open window and thought that it tasted different from the air in the valley: sharper, cleaner, less complicated by the weight of other people's expectations.
After dinner, Agnes set a lamp on the table and looked at her cousin across it. "You staying a while?" she said.
"Yes," Evelyn said.
"Good." Agnes picked up her mending. "I've been needing someone to help me argue with Thomas Reed about that fence line. Man's been five inches over the property marker for three years, and he acts like I'm speaking Greek every time I bring it up."
Evelyn almost smiled. "Who is Thomas Reed?"
"Neighbor to the north. Good man. Infuriating about fences." Agnes pulled her thread. "You'll meet him. He comes around."
"All right."
Agnes looked at her again—the direct, appraising look that had always been her cousin's particular habit. "You want to talk about it?"
"Not tonight."
"Whenever you're ready."
"Thank you."
She took the lamp to the back room and sat on the edge of the bed in the mountain dark. And the quiet of it—the deep, unperformed, uncomplicating quiet of a place that had no opinion about her whatsoever—settled around her like something she had been waiting for without knowing she was waiting.
She opened her sister's book of poetry. She read until the lamp burned low. She slept better than she had in two years.
In the morning, she went to work. Not because anyone told her to; because she had always been a woman who worked, who found in the specific, tangible tasks of a day something that her mind needed: the satisfaction of a thing done, a problem solved, a gap closed.
Agnes' property was sixty acres of mountain farmland, rough and honest. Nothing elegant about it. The fence on the eastern side was damaged from a fallen tree. The kitchen garden had been planted late and needed tending. There was a barn with a leaking roof that Agnes had been patching herself for two seasons. Evelyn assessed all of this in the first morning.
By the afternoon, she was in the kitchen garden with her sleeves pushed up, pulling weeds and thinning the carrot rows with the focused attention of someone who has finally found a task equal to their energy.
She was on her knees in the dirt when she heard boots on the path behind her.
"Miss Agnes isn't home," said a voice.
She stood, brushing soil from her hands, and turned. The man standing off the path was perhaps forty, broad, with the look of someone who spent most of his time outdoors and had made his peace with it. He had a hat in his hands and the direct, measuring gaze of a man accustomed to looking at land.
"She's gone to town," Evelyn said. "I'm her cousin, Evelyn."
The man nodded slowly. "Thomas Reed."
"The fence man."