"He isn't empty," Evelyn said on the walk back.
"No," Thomas said. "Empty men don't get this far. That's what makes him expensive to fight."
On the fourth evening, by the stove in the parlor while Mrs. Orth knitted and pretended not to listen, Evelyn said, "I believed the letter because I wanted a life that did not require my cousins' permission. That wanting made me useful to someone else's ledger. I am ashamed of the wanting and not ashamed of wanting a life. Both can be true."
Thomas nodded. "I refused Rourke's buyout because the ground is good and because selling under pressure teaches the mountain that fear is currency. I am not a hero for that. I am a man who hates being managed. That hate made me a target. Both can be true."
"Do you want a wife?" she asked, and the question sat between them without romantic lighting.
"I want not to be killed for ore," he said. "I want the claim filed clean. I want spring to come without a forged letter defining me. A wife—if I ever ask—will be asked in a hand that is mine, on paper that isn't bait. Not tonight. Not because a seal invented the timing."
Evelyn looked into the stove's small window of fire. "I am not asking you to ask. I am asking whether I am still a prop if I stay."
"If you stay, you are a person who chose to stay," Thomas said. "Props don't choose. They get packed."
Mrs. Orth's needles clicked approval or warning; with her it was often both.
The deputy from the county seat arrived on the sixth day—a woman named Rosa Lang, which surprised half the street and pleased Mrs. Orth. Lang wore a dark coat, a badge without flourish, and the expression of someone who had ridden through snow to do a job rather than to be liked. She read the wires, examined the seal under a glass, walked the spur with Thomas, and interviewed Evelyn alone for an hour in the parlor with the door half open for propriety and half closed for truth.
"Why did you believe him when he said he didn't write it?" Lang asked.
"Because his fear of the seal arrived before his manners," Evelyn said. "Liars practice comfort. He practiced alarm."
Lang wrote that down. "And why stay?"
"Because leaving would finish Rourke's sentence for him," Evelyn said. "And because I am tired of being finished by other people's sentences."