"Margaret," she said, without planning to. "If you're going to be reading my husband's private accounts at my kitchen table, we can dispense with the formality."
He nodded. "Nathan."
She walked to the door. Then she stopped, with her hand on the frame, and said without turning around, "Six discrepancies. $112. If we can get a judge to look at that cleanly, without Mercer's interference, do you honestly think we have a case?"
She heard him stand, heard the chair push back. When he answered, his voice was quiet and absolutely sure: "I think Caleb Mercer has been robbing you in plain sight and calling it a debt. And I think the reason he had you tied to a post this morning instead of taking you to court is because he knows what a judge would find if anyone looked carefully." A pause. "So, yes. I think you have a case. I think it's a strong one."
She nodded once, still not turning. "Good night, Nathan."
"Good night, Margaret."
She listened to his boots cross the kitchen floor, and the back door open and close. And then she stood alone in her own house for the first time all day. And the relief of it—the relief of having said some of it out loud to someone who listened without flinching—hit her so hard and so unexpectedly that she had to grip the doorframe to hold herself steady.
She was not a woman who cried easily. She had proved that thoroughly in the past eight months. But she stood there for a minute in the dark, just breathing, before she moved to blow out the lamp and go to bed.
She did not sleep well. She didn't expect to.
Nathan was gone before first light. She knew it because she heard his horse—that distinctive, even-paced walk—moving down the lane before the sun had cleared the horizon. She was already up, already dressed, already working through the next problem, which was the fence line on the north boundary that she'd found cut three days ago and hadn't had time to fix properly. She pulled on her work gloves and went out to the fence.
She was setting the third post when she heard a rider coming up the south approach, which was not the direction Nathan had gone. She straightened and waited, one hand resting near the tool belt at her hip, which held a hammer and not much else, but the weight of it was steadying.
It was Roy Cutter, one of Mercer's men. He rode up to the fence line and sat his horse, looking down at her with the particular expression of a man who has been given an unpleasant job and is not trying very hard to pretend otherwise.