After a minute, she said, "He did this on purpose. This specific timing. He waited until he knew I had a lawyer, until he knew the case was being built, and then he reached for Thomas."
"He wants me to panic."
"Yes."
"He wants me to pull back on the filing and offer a settlement to protect Thomas."
"That's what I'd guess."
She turned from the counter. Her voice when she spoke was very quiet and very certain. "He picked the wrong leverage," she said. "Because the reason I am fighting this hard is Thomas. Every morning I get up and I go through those ledgers and I fight for this land because it belongs to Thomas. It was my father's and it will be Thomas's. And no amount of manufactured debt, and no man sent to Denver to intimidate a twenty-year-old boy, is going to change that."
Something in Nathan's face shifted. It was not the ghost of a smile this time; it was something fuller, something that had been building slowly over ten days of watching her and had finally arrived at wherever it had been heading.
"Then we go back to the ranch," he said. "And we finish what we started."
"Yes," she said. "We do."
She walked out of the telegraph office and into the late afternoon, and the town of Red Hollow looked back at her from its storefronts and boardwalks, and she looked back at it. And this time, the looking held something it hadn't held ten days ago—something that Caleb Mercer, for all his money and his lawyers and the men he sent to Denver, had not managed to take from her.
She walked to her horse. She mounted without assistance. She turned toward the road home, and somewhere behind her she heard Hart say quietly to Nathan, "That is the most formidable woman I have met in twelve years of law practice."