"Most people do," she said, and she didn't mean it with bitterness, just with the simple, factual weariness of a woman who had been underestimated her entire adult life and had learned to use it.
"Not anymore," Nathan said.
She looked up at him. He was leaning against the doorframe, hat in his hands, that steady, quiet attention that had stopped surprising her sometime in the last four days and had started feeling—she didn't examine this too closely—ordinary. Like something that had always been part of the room.
"Get some sleep," she said. "Tomorrow we ride into town."
He raised an eyebrow.
"Hart says he needs to speak to anyone else who had dealings with Mercer," she said. "And I have an idea about who might be willing to talk now that they know they're not alone."
The next morning, they rode, the three of them, into Red Hollow, and the town watched them come the way towns watch things they haven't decided how to categorize yet. Margaret had lived here for fourteen years. She had attended births and funerals and harvest suppers and church services and Fourth of July dances in this town, and for the past eight months, she had watched it look away from her. She had felt the shape of its silence every time she came to get supplies or mail, or to argue unsuccessfully with the telegraph operator.
She felt something different today. The difference was small: it was the way Clara Briggs, Tom's wife, stopped sweeping her front step and watched them pass without looking away; it was the way Ed Loomis from the mill nodded at Nathan from the door of his shop—not at Margaret specifically, but the gesture included her; it was the way Reverend Hollis, who had stood with his hands folded watching her take a whip ten days ago, stepped off the boardwalk and crossed the street toward them.
She pulled her horse up.
"Mrs. Lawson," Hollis said. He was a thin man, hollow-cheeked, with the permanent expression of someone carrying a private guilt. He had that expression very strongly this morning. "I wonder if I might have a word."
She looked at him and said nothing.