"I can't find them."
He set down his pen. "What do you mean, you can't find them?"
"I mean that Evelyn managed them, and I don't know where she kept things, and I have been unable to locate the records I need to tell Cook what we can spend this month." She paused. "Also, the correspondence with the Caldwells is apparently ongoing about the Thursday visit, and I don't know what was agreed. And the Caldwells sent a note this morning that I can't fully interpret because I don't know what the previous three letters said."
Nathaniel was quiet.
"Also," Margaret continued, in the tone of someone delivering a series of blows and committed to seeing it through, "the staff is confused. There are apparently decisions that Evelyn made on a regular basis that no one has been making. And Thomas"—she meant the footman—"came to me this morning to ask about something called the roster, and I didn't know what he was talking about."
"The household ran before she was here," Nathaniel said.
"Did it?" Margaret looked at him steadily. "Because I've been living in this house for forty years, and I'm telling you that in the last three days, I have had seventeen questions I cannot answer that I have apparently been asking Evelyn to answer for the past two years without ever noticing that I was doing it." He didn't say anything. "She is not," Margaret said, with the particular precision of a woman who does not concede things easily, "merely decorative. You should know that. You should have known that."
Then she left.
The fourth day, one of the field workers came to the house with a question about the rotation of the lower pasture, which apparently had a schedule that existed only in Evelyn's records—which were with Evelyn.
Nathaniel sat at his desk in the quiet and looked at the household around him that was, without fanfare or drama, very slowly coming apart at the seams.
He had called her difficult to love. He had meant it as an explanation. He had thought of it as simple honesty. He sat with it now and turned it over in the way you turn over something you thought was one thing and realize is another. And what it was—what it had always been, he understood now with the particular cold clarity of a man who has lost something and can finally see its shape in its absence—was not honesty at all. It was cowardice. It was the cowardice of a man who had been given something of genuine value and had told himself and her that it wasn't enough, rather than admitting that the failure of feeling was in him.
He sat with this for a long time. Then he called for a horse.
He rode hard the first day and learned nothing useful. Nathaniel Whitmore had not ridden hard in years. He had forgotten what it cost: the way it emptied your mind of everything except the immediate—the road, the animal beneath you, the heat pressing down from a Virginia summer sky that had no interest in a man's private reckoning.
He stopped twice. He asked at a crossroads tavern whether anyone had seen a woman matching Evelyn's description traveling north. The barkeep looked at him with the particular blankness of a man who had learned that strangers asking questions about women were not always asking for innocent reasons, and said he couldn't say. He slept badly in a room above the tavern and was back on the road before dawn.
The second day, he reached Alderman's. He tied his horse at the post outside Prentice's office and walked in without knocking, which was the habit of a man who had spent his whole life in rooms that opened for him.
Mr. Prentice looked up from his desk. "Mr. Whitmore," he said, without surprise and without warmth.
"I need to know where she went."
"Good morning," Prentice said. He set down his pen. "Sit down if you like."
"I don't want to sit down. I want to know."
"I heard what you want." Prentice folded his hands on the desk. "I'm not going to tell you. And before you remind me of your standing in this county, let me spare us both the time: your standing does not extend to the private affairs of my clients."
Nathaniel stood in the center of the small office and felt something he was entirely unaccustomed to, which was the specific frustration of a man who has always been able to apply pressure to a situation and is discovering that pressure has no purchase here. "She is my wife," he said.
"She is," Prentice agreed. "And she made a choice, and she made it here in front of me in twelve minutes with complete clarity. I've known Evelyn Harper since she was fifteen years old. She was not confused." He looked at Nathaniel steadily. "Are you?"
The question was not unkind. That made it worse.
Nathaniel sat down. He sat in the chair across from the solicitor, put his elbows on his knees, and looked at the floor. And there was a long moment in which the only sound was the street noise coming through the single window and the particular internal sound a man makes when he is trying to find the words for something he has never tried to put into words before.
"I said something I cannot take back," he said finally.
"Yes."
"I need to find her."
"I know you do." Prentice was quiet for a moment. "The question I'd ask you—and I say this as a man who has handled enough estates and enough wills and enough family arrangements in this county to know how these things tend to end—is what you plan to do when you find her." Nathaniel looked up. "Because if you find her," Prentice continued, "and you bring her back, and you continue in the way you've been continuing, you will not have fixed anything. You will only have returned a woman to a house she had the courage to leave."
The words hung in the office air.
"Tell me where she is," Nathaniel said.
Prentice studied him—the study of a man looking for something specific and not yet certain he's found it. Then he said, "I'll tell you this: she has family in the mountains north of here. That's all I'll give you."
It was enough. Nathaniel left Alderman's within the hour. He rode north.
The road into the mountains was not the kind of road the Whitmore estate's grounds had prepared him for. It was rough, root-crossed, with long sections where the hill made the footing uncertain and the trees pressed close enough that the light came through in pieces. He was not a man who noticed landscape as a general rule, but the mountain road had a quality to it that was difficult to ignore: the way it demanded attention, the way it refused to allow the comfortable kind of thinking that flat land and open sky permitted.
He stopped at a mill at the base of a long climb. An old man was sitting outside; he had the unhurried look of someone who had been sitting in the same spot for most of his life and had no particular plans to change that. Nathaniel asked about the road ahead.
The man pointed. He said the road wound north for another twelve miles before it flattened. He said there were two settlements: one near a creek crossing, one higher up toward the ridge.
He said, "You looking for someone?"
"A woman," Nathaniel said. "Brown hair. Quiet. Came up this road about three weeks ago."
The old man thought about this. "Don't know about quiet," he said finally. "But there's a woman up at the Whitfield place that fixed my porch step last week without being asked. Agnes Whitfield's cousin. Come from the valley." He looked at Nathaniel with the particular attention of an old man who has seen enough to recognize the shape of certain stories. "That who you looking for?"
Nathaniel felt something move in his chest: relief, yes, but underneath it something more complicated—the kind of thing that happens when you've been chasing something and suddenly find that it has not been waiting for you. "Might be," he said.