He was quiet for a moment, which was itself a kind of answer. "I spent a lot of years," he said finally, "being exactly what situations needed me to be, which meant most people only ever saw one piece of it. The gun, or the information, or the man who showed up and then left." He turned his hat over in his hands once. "Gets to be a habit. Letting people see what's useful and keeping the rest back."
"And now?"
He looked at her—a direct look, the kind he didn't soften or redirect. "Now," he said, "I'm standing on a boardwalk in Red Hollow, Wyoming, and I'm not sure I'm in any hurry to leave."
The weight of that settled between them, plain and unhurried and requiring no immediate response, which was the way Nathan Cole said most things that mattered.
She turned back toward the street. "We should see how Hart is doing with Pete's statement."
"We should," Nathan agreed, and they walked across the street together, and neither of them said anything else about it. But she was very aware of exactly where he was walking, and so was he.
The afternoon brought the next crisis, in the way crises in Red Hollow had a habit of arriving without announcement from the direction you weren't watching.
They were at the county recorder's office, Hart filing the formal response to Mercer's expedited petition, when Roy Cutter walked in. Not alone. He had two men with him that Margaret didn't recognize—harder men, with the look of hired hands who hired out for more than cattle work.
Cutter looked at Nathan. He looked at Hart. He looked at Margaret. "Mr. Mercer would like a word," he said, "with Mrs. Lawson. Privately."
"Mrs. Lawson is occupied with legal business," Hart said without looking up from what he was writing.
"I wasn't talking to you."