She went back inside. She went to the desk and she opened a new ledger: clean, unwritten in, full of empty pages. And she wrote at the top of the first one, in her careful accountant's hand, a single heading. She didn't write Margaret Lawson v. Caleb Mercer. She wrote: The Record, Full and True.
And she started at the beginning.
Three days into the work, the second shoe dropped. Nathan had ridden into town to pick up supplies—coffee and cornmeal and lamp oil, the ordinary maintenance of a life under siege—and he came back faster than he'd gone, which told her before he opened his mouth that something had happened. He dismounted and came straight to where she was working at the kitchen table, and he set down a folded piece of paper in front of her.
"Mercer filed a petition this morning," he said.
She picked up the paper. It was a copy of a legal notice filed that day with the county recorder's office, requesting expedited review of the Lawson property debt, with a new attached claim: not just the original $430, but an additional $200 in what Mercer was calling "costs of collection and property management accumulated during the period of dispute."
$630 total. $200 manufactured out of nothing, added in the past week, filed officially, designed to...
"He's trying to get ahead of Hart," she said. Her voice was very steady; she was proud of that. "If he can get the expedited review granted before Hart arrives, the judge signs off on it before we have a chance to present the ledger evidence."
"That's exactly what he's doing," Nathan said. "The expedited review hearing is scheduled for eight days from today."
Eight days. Hart arrived in four. That left four days to review the documents, prepare the argument, and get a counter-filing in front of the same judge before the expedited hearing. Four days.
"Can Hart do it?" she asked.
Nathan looked at her steadily. "I think the question is whether Hart and you together can do it."