"Don't thank me. I'm not doing it for you. I just don't want to read in the paper that you hit a deer."
He nodded. She turned to go back up the stairs, and then turned around again.
"The thing you said," she said. "In the parking lot. About my claim being first. About how you wouldn't go around me."
"Yes."
"Did you mean it? Or was that the polite thing again?"
He thought about it, because she deserved for him to think about it.
"I meant it," he said. "I've had thirty-three years to figure out the order of things. You're ahead of me. You always were. I just didn't know you were there. I thought I was writing to both of you. I thought you were in those envelopes too." He turned his hat in his hands. "If you'd rather I didn't come back, I won't. I'll tell your mother so myself, if you want. I'll find a way to tell her that doesn't hurt you."
Daria looked at him a long time.
"I'll call you," she said finally. "Or I won't. Either way, you'll know."
He rode the half mile to the Prospector and checked in, and the young man at the desk, Jun, gave him the rate without being asked and a look that said news traveled fast in Ely, which it always had. He sat on the edge of the motel bed in his boots and called Hector, who answered on the first ring, and he told him.
When he was done Hector was quiet for so long that Bonner thought the call had dropped.
"She said you can't take it from her," Hector said finally. "Her part."